So, OPAQUE stands for what? Or, do we not care anymore? :) Apparently, it's based on "aPAKE" which stands for "Asymmetric PAKE", but I guess OPAQUE is an acronym that sounds cool.
> Apparently, it's based on "aPAKE" which stands for "Asymmetric PAKE"
It is an "aPAKE" which stands for "augmented PAKE". An aPAKE is client-server vs peer-to-peer. The original PAKE was peer-to-peer then augmented to be client-server. A peer-to-peer PAKE is called PAKE or balanced PAKE, but "PAKE" could be use generally to mean client-server and/or peer-to-peer PAKE. aPAKEs are sometimes called unbalanced PAKEs.
I've heard people say asymmetric PAKE and symmetric PAKE (for client-server and peer-to-peer), but this causes confusion with asymmetric and symmetric cryptography. Thus should not be used. And was likely from a misunderstanding around what "a" meant in "aPAKE".
Oh there is a "double augmented PAKE" which I recently figured out a use case for that, WiFi. Also technically OPAQUE is a "double augmented PAKE", but only defined as an augmented PAKE.
Well, if it was just named opaque that would be confusing because that's a word meaning the opposite of transparent.
Naming things is hard for most people. Where some people are imaginative enough to name their stream cipher ChaCha20, the best you can expect from many engineers is something like PADMÉ (a padding scheme).
