Noise Protocol Framework.

A composable framework by Trevor Perrin for building modern, formally analyzable secure channel protocols out of Diffie-Hellman, HKDF, and AEAD — the cryptographic core of WireGuard, Signal's I/O Pipe, and many newer protocols. It belongs to the Cryptography category of cybersecurity.

A composable framework by Trevor Perrin for building modern, formally analyzable secure channel protocols out of Diffie-Hellman, HKDF, and AEAD — the cryptographic core of WireGuard, Signal's I/O Pipe, and many newer protocols.

The Noise Protocol Framework, designed by Trevor Perrin and now standardized at noiseprotocol.org, is a meta-spec for building secure-channel handshakes from a small, well-understood set of primitives: an elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman function (typically X25519), a hash (typically SHA-256 or BLAKE2s), an AEAD (typically AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305), and HKDF-style symmetric mixing. A Noise protocol is identified by a pattern (e.g. `Noise_IK_25519_ChaChaPoly_BLAKE2s`) describing exactly which handshake messages flow in which direction and which pre-shared knowledge each side starts with. Standard patterns cover one-way (`N`), interactive (`XX`, `IK`, `XK`, `NK`), and post-quantum hybrid variants. Noise is the cryptographic core of WireGuard (`Noise_IK_25519_ChaChaPoly_BLAKE2s`), Signal's I/O Pipe, the Lightning Network's BOLT-8, and many newer protocols that want modern, formally analyzable handshakes without inventing custom cryptography. Formal verification work (Bhargavan et al., Donenfeld) and the framework's design constraints make it a popular choice when TLS is too heavy or too flexible.

Defences for Noise Protocol Framework typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: Noise framework, Noise handshake.