markqvist/reticulumThe cryptography-based networking stack for building unstoppable networks with LoRa, Packet Radio, WiFi and everything in between.
[!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.
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.
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.
