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KEKS ¶

KEKS is compact, deterministic, concise and streaming binary serialisation format. It is aimed to be lightweight in terms of CPU, memory, storage and codec implementation size usage. It supports wide range of data types, making it able to transparently replace JSON.

KEKS means: kompakt, entschlossen, knapp, strömend.

But why!? Because there is no satisfiable codec for all set of requirements below.

• It must be schema-less format. Schema-aware ones have their definite valuable advantages, but also a complication drawbacks and non-friendliness to humans.
• Its encoder/decoder must be very compact and small in terms of code and branches amount, to reduce attack surface on the codec itself.
• It must support enough data types for being able at least to replace JSON transparently.
• Its encoding must be deterministic – there must be only a single representation of the structured data, allowing its usage in cryptography-related contexts.
• Its encoder should be streaming-friendly, making encoder simpler and allowing memory-constrained systems workability.
• Its encoding should be reasonably compact, to be friendly to storage space constrained systems.
• It should be frugal to CPU usage for both performance/memory constrained and high data volume applications.
• It should differentiate binary and human-readable strings.
• It would be nice to have human-editable intermediate representation.

Are not there any satisfiable codecs?

	Schemaless	Simple	Deterministic	Streamable	Compact
ASN.1 DER	N	N	Y	N	N
ASN.1 CER	N	N	Y	Y	N
XDR	N	Y	N	N	N
JSON	Y	N	N	Y	N
BSON	Y	Y	N	N	N
MessagePack	Y	Y	N	N	Y
CBOR	Y	N	N	Y	Y
dCBOR	Y	N	Y	N	Y
Netstrings	Y	Y	Y	N	~
Bencode	Y	Y	Y	Y	~
Canonical S-expression	Y	Y	Y	Y	~
KEKS	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y

	Big str	Bin str	Human str	Ints	Bigints	Lists	Structures	Datetime
ASN.1 DER	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
ASN.1 CER	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
XDR	N	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	N
JSON	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
BSON	N	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	Y
MessagePack	N	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	N
CBOR	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	N
dCBOR	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	N
Netstrings	Y	Y	N	N	N	N	N	N
Bencode	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
CSExp	Y	Y	N	N	N	Y	N	N
KEKS	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y

Note about CBOR:

• Hardly you will find wide range of CBOR libraries supporting strict validation of deterministically encoded CBOR structures.
• Tagged string/integer can not be taken as a viable first-class bigint/datetime data support, because many decoders do not support tags and won’t be able to interpret/validate them.
• Non-string map keys very complicates representation process for dynamically types languages.

Copyright © 2024-2025 Sergey Matveev

• Install:
• Encoding:
• Schema:		Structure validation against schemas
• CM:		Cryptographic messages
• Thanks:
• Concepts Index:

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