Reticulum Network Stack

[!WARNING]
A significant number of hastily launched, incorrect, dubious, directly harmful and, in most cases, entirely LLM-generated fakes of Reticulum implementations, "documentation", "guides" and user-facing applications are currently being marketed under polished, but ultimately misleading or outright deceptive claims.

For more detailed information, see the relevant sections of the Brandolini's Reference chapter of the manual. Known good community implementations are listed in the Community Implementations section of this readme. For software and projects recognized by the Reticulum community, see the Programs Using Reticulum chapter of the manual.

Machine-generated content derived from the RNS source code or documentation (such as "implementations", "guides" for sale, et cetera), are in several, well-documented cases violating the open source licenses that granted rights of copying and distribution.

Any claimed assertion of copyright or grant of license (Apache, GPL, et cetera) that such projects are making are void grants. Both the violators themselves, and all downstream projects using the infringing derivatives, are directly and personally liable for the legal consequences.

Do not use these "projects", they are a hazard to the entire ecosystem we have been carefully building over the last ten years.

This repository is a public mirror. All development is happening elsewhere.

To understand the foundational philosophy and goals of this system, read the Zen of Reticulum.

Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. It can operate even with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth. Reticulum allows you to build wide-area networks with off-the-shelf tools, and offers end-to-end encryption and connectivity, initiator anonymity, autoconfiguring cryptographically backed multi-hop transport, efficient addressing, unforgeable delivery acknowledgements and more.

The vision of Reticulum is to allow anyone to be their own network operator, and to make it cheap and easy to cover vast areas with a myriad of independent, inter-connectable and autonomous networks. 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, and require no central oversight. Networks for human beings. Networks for the people.

Reticulum is a complete networking stack, and does not rely on IP or higher layers, but it is possible to use IP as the underlying carrier for Reticulum. It is therefore trivial to tunnel Reticulum over the Internet or private IP networks.

Having no dependencies on traditional networking stacks frees up overhead that has been used to implement a networking stack built directly on cryptographic principles, allowing resilience and stable functionality, even in open and trustless networks.

No kernel modules or drivers are required. Reticulum runs completely in userland, and can run on practically any system that runs Python 3.

Read The Manual

The full documentation for Reticulum is available at markqvist.github.io/Reticulum/manual/.

You can also download the Reticulum manual as a PDF or as an e-book in EPUB format.

For more info, see reticulum.network and the FAQ section of the wiki.

Notable Features

Coordination-less globally unique addressing and identification
Fully self-configuring multi-hop routing over heterogeneous carriers
Flexible scalability over heterogeneous topologies
- Reticulum can carry data over any mixture of physical mediums and topologies
- Low-bandwidth networks can co-exist and interoperate with large, high-bandwidth networks
Initiator anonymity, communicate without revealing your identity
- Reticulum does not include source addresses on any packets
Asymmetric X25519 encryption and Ed25519 signatures as a basis for all communication
- The foundational Reticulum Identity Keys are 512-bit Elliptic Curve keysets
Forward Secrecy is available for all communication types, both for single packets and over links
Reticulum uses the following format for encrypted tokens:
- Ephemeral per-packet and link keys and derived from an ECDH key exchange on Curve25519
- AES-256 in CBC mode with PKCS7 padding
- HMAC using SHA256 for authentication
- IVs are generated through os.urandom()
Unforgeable packet delivery confirmations
Flexible and extensible interface system
- Reticulum includes a large variety of built-in interface types
- Ability to load and utilise custom user- or community-supplied interface types
- Easily create your own custom interfaces for communicating over anything
Authentication and virtual network segmentation on all supported interface types
An intuitive and easy-to-use API
- Simpler and easier to use than sockets APIs, but more powerful
- Makes building distributed and decentralised applications much simpler
Reliable and efficient transfer of arbitrary amounts of data
- Reticulum can handle a few bytes of data or files of many gigabytes
- Sequencing, compression, transfer coordination and checksumming are automatic
- The API is very easy to use, and provides transfer progress
Lightweight, flexible and expandable Request/Response mechanism
Efficient link establishment
- Total cost of setting up an encrypted and verified link is only 3 packets, totalling 297 bytes
- Low cost of keeping links open at only 0.44 bits per second
Reliable sequential delivery with Channel and Buffer mechanisms

Community Resources

The references listed here are not run, managed or moderated by the Reticulum project or its maintainer. They are provided by dedicated, independent volunteers in the community, for the benefit of anyone interested in learning more about Reticulum.

If you find anything that is no longer accurate, incorrect or simply not quite up to date, do not demand or complain towards the maintainers of these resources. Instead, take the task upon yourself to help out and improve things by working on, and offering the contributions you would like to see, like the creators of the above did themselves.

Reticulum v1.4.2