Show HN: Ariadne – A Rust implementation of aperiodic cryptography • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Ariadne – A Rust implementation of aperiodic cryptography

#31

Post by johnisgood » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #10

ciphernomad-org wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. The probability of a state collision is cryptographically negligible, on the order of breaking a 256-bit hash function. You're also right that AES-GCM is faster and has hardware support. Ariadne explores a different trade-off. Its primary advantage is its architectural agility. Instead of a fixed algorithm, the sequence of operations in Ariadne is dynamic and secret, derived from the key and data his…

FYI your comments seem to be showing up as dead (dead comments don't show up by default, only when people logged into HN have them enabled), I think something may have triggered a shadowban on your account. Might want to send a message to the moderators. I hit 'vouch' for the comment I'm responding to so it should be visible, but the other response you gave ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44353277 ) is still l…

It does not show up as dead for me, but your comment was made 7 hours ago.

Re: Show HN: Ariadne – A Rust implementation of aperiodic cryptography

#32

Post by ciphernomad-org » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

Medea wrote: post #29

bilekas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a privacy-preserving network layer communication protocol, think onion router. Removing the dependency on third party verification. Some further reading : https://netsec.ethz.ch/publications/papers/ariadne.pdf it's generally seen as more secure and in cases more efficient. > Ariadne enhances previous approaches to preserve communication privacy by introducing two novelties. First, the source route is encode…

Are you sure it is the same Ariadne? The paper you linked is from 2002 and does not mention aperiodic or "Cryptographic Virtual Machine"

You are correct, it is not the same project. That's a name collision with a 2002 paper.

To your original question on the benefits over a standard AEAD:

For stateless encryption, our `ariadne-etm` crate offers no major advantage. The core protocol, however, is a programmable, stateful cryptographic engine. This enables new protocol designs.

For example:

1. Smarter Transport Layers. The Labyrinth can be a public parameter derived from a server's key. This allows building in features like proof-of-work for DoS resistance or cryptographic watermarks for traitor-tracing directly into the transport layer.

2. Verifiable Stateful Computation. The architecture allows proving that a secret, stateful program was honestly executed over a verifiable duration. The program's execution path leaves an irreversible "scar" on a one-time-use Labyrinth, creating a commitment to the entire computational history.

The point isn't to replace AES. It's a new foundation for different kinds of cryptographic systems.

Re: Show HN: Ariadne – A Rust implementation of aperiodic cryptography

#33

Post by AlotOfReading » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:07 PM UTC

This seems very sensitive to the quality of the hash function. If you had a distinguishing attack, or used something with MD construction instead of BLAKE3, it seems pretty likely that you would also have issues with the path mechanism.