Reticulum
Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth.
The vision of Reticulum is to allow anyone to operate their own sovereign communication networks, and to make it cheap and easy to cover vast areas with a myriad of independent, interconnectable and autonomous networks. Reticulum is Unstoppable Networks for The People.
Reticulum is not
one network. It is a tool for building
thousands of networks. Networks without kill-switches, surveillance, censorship and control. Networks that can freely interoperate, associate and disassociate with each other. Reticulum is Networks for Human Beings.
From a users perspective, Reticulum allows the creation of applications that respect and empower the autonomy and sovereignty of communities and individuals. Reticulum provides secure digital communication that cannot be subjected to outside control, manipulation or censorship.
Reticulum enables the construction of both small and potentially planetary-scale networks, without any need for hierarchical or beaureucratic structures to control or manage them, while ensuring individuals and communities full sovereignty over their own network segments.
Notable Characteristics
While Reticulum solves the same problem that any network stack does, namely to get data reliably from one point to another over a number of intermediaries, it does so in a way that is very different from other networking technologies.
- Reticulum does not use source addresses. No packets transmitted include information about the address, place, machine or person they originated from.
- There is no central control over the address space in Reticulum. Anyone can allocate as many addresses as they need, when they need them.
- Reticulum ensures end-to-end connectivity. Newly generated addresses become globally reachable in a matter of seconds to a few minutes.
- Addresses are self-sovereign and portable. Once an address has been created, it can be moved physically to another place in the network, and continue to be reachable.
- All communication is secured with strong, modern encryption by default.
- All encryption keys are ephemeral, and communication offers forward secrecy by default.
- It is not possible to establish unencrypted links in Reticulum networks.
- It is not possible to send unencrypted packets to any destinations in the network.
- Destinations receiving unencrypted packets will drop them as invalid.
The supported interface types include:
- Any ethernet device
- Almost all WiFi-based hardware
- LoRa using RNode
- Packet Radio TNCs (with or without AX.25)
- KISS-compatible hardware and software modems
- Any device with a serial port
- TCP over IP networks
- UDP over IP networks
- External programs via stdio or pipes
- Custom hardware via stdio or pipes
For a more detailed info, and a full list of supported interface types, please read the Communications Hardware and Supported Interfaces chapters of the manual.
Reticulum can also be encapsulated over existing IP networks, so there’s nothing stopping you from using it over wired ethernet, your local WiFi network or the Internet, where it’ll work just as well. In fact, one of the strengths of Reticulum is how easily it allows you to connect different mediums into a self-configuring, resilient and encrypted mesh, using any available mixture of available infrastructure.
As an example, it’s possible to set up a Raspberry Pi connected to both a LoRa radio, a packet radio TNC and a WiFi network. Once the interfaces are configured, Reticulum will take care of the rest, and any device on the WiFi network can communicate with nodes on the LoRa and packet radio sides of the network, and vice versa.
