markqvist/reticulumThe cryptography-based networking stack for building unstoppable networks with LoRa, Packet Radio, WiFi and everything in between.
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 Python code in this repository is the Reference Implementation of Reticulum.
The Reticulum Protocol is defined entirely and authoritatively by this reference
implementation, and its associated manual. It is maintained by Mark Qvist,
identified by the Reticulum Identity <bc7291552be7a58f361522990465165c>.
No second-order protocol specification derivatives currently do, or will ever exist. You can't get a better specification than one that is executable, functional, testable, deployed and operating 24/7 across the planet.
There is not, and never will be a separate, derived "formal spec", "RFC" or anything similar for Reticulum:
The reference implementation is the final, authoritative specification.
Compatibility with the Reticulum Protocol is defined as having full interoperability, and sufficient functional parity with this reference implementation. Any specific protocol implementation that achieves this is Reticulum. Any that does not is not Reticulum.
The reference implementation is licensed under the Reticulum License.
The Reticulum Protocol was dedicated to the Public Domain in 2016.
If you want to quickly get an idea of what Reticulum can do, take a look at the Programs Using Reticulum section of the manual, or the following resources:
rnphone program, that can be used to build hardware telephones.Over practically any medium that can support at least a half-duplex channel with greater throughput than 5 bits per second, and an MTU of 500 bytes. Data radios, modems, LoRa radios, serial lines, AX.25 TNCs, amateur radio digital modes, WiFi and Ethernet devices, free-space optical links, and similar systems are all examples of the types of physical devices Reticulum can use.
An open-source LoRa-based interface called RNode has been designed specifically for use with Reticulum. It is possible to build yourself, or it can be purchased as a complete transceiver that just needs a USB connection to the host.
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.
The best way to get started with the Reticulum Network Stack depends on what you want to do. For full details and examples, have a look at the Getting Started Fast section of the Reticulum Manual.
To simply install Reticulum and related utilities on your system, the easiest way is via pip.
You can then start any program that uses Reticulum, or start Reticulum as a system service with
the rnsd utility.
pip install rns
If you are using an operating system that blocks normal user package installation via pip,
you can return pip to normal behaviour by editing the ~/.config/pip/pip.conf file,
and adding the following directive in the [global] section:
[global]
break-system-packages = true
Alternatively, you can use the pipx tool to install Reticulum in an isolated environment:
pipx install rns
When first started, Reticulum will create a default configuration file, providing basic connectivity to other Reticulum peers that might be locally reachable. The default config file contains a few examples, and references for creating a more complex configuration.
If you have an old version of pip on your system, you may need to upgrade it first with pip install pip --upgrade. If you no not already have pip installed, you can install it using the package manager of your system with sudo apt install python3-pip or similar.
For more detailed examples on how to expand communication over many mediums such as packet radio or LoRa, serial ports, or over fast IP links and the Internet using the UDP and TCP interfaces, take a look at the Supported Interfaces section of the Reticulum Manual.
Reticulum includes a range of useful utilities for managing your networks, viewing status and information, and other tasks. You can read more about these programs in the Included Utility Programs section of the Reticulum Manual.
rnsd for running Reticulum as an always-available servicernstatus, that displays information about interfacesrnpath letting you view and modify path tablesrnprobe for checking connectivity to destinationsrncp making it easy to transfer files between systemsrnid let's you manage Identities and encrypt/decrypt filesrnsh program allows you to establish fully interactive shell session with remote systemsrnx let's you run simple commands and programs and retrieve output from remote systemsrngit program provides a full multi-repository Git node for serving repositories over Reticulumgit-remote-rns helper allows you to interact with Git repositories over ReticulumAll tools, including rnx and rncp, work reliably and well even over very
low-bandwidth links like LoRa or Packet Radio. For full-featured remote shells
over Reticulum, also have a look at the rnsh
program.
Reticulum implements a range of generalised interface types that covers most of the communications hardware that Reticulum can run over. If your hardware is not supported, it's simple to implement a custom interface module.
Pull requests for custom interfaces are gratefully accepted, provided they are generally useful and well-tested in real-world usage.
Currently, the following built-in interfaces are supported:
Reticulum targets a very wide usable performance envelope, but prioritises functionality and performance on low-bandwidth mediums. The goal is to provide a dynamic performance envelope from 250 bits per second, to 1 gigabit per second on normal hardware.
Currently, the usable performance envelope is approximately 150 bits per second to 500 megabits per second, with physical mediums faster than that not being saturated. Performance beyond the current level is intended for future upgrades, but not highly prioritised at this point in time.
All core protocol features are implemented and functioning, but additions will probably occur as real-world use is explored and understood. The API and wire-format can be considered stable.
The installation of the default rns package requires only two external dependencies, listed
below. Almost all systems and distributions have readily available packages for
these dependencies, and when the rns package is installed with pip, they
will be downloaded and installed as well.
On more unusual systems, and in some rare cases, it might not be possible to
install or even compile one or more of the above modules. In such situations,
you can use the rnspure package instead, which require no external
dependencies for installation. Please note that the contents of the rns and
rnspure packages are identical. The only difference is that the rnspure
package lists no dependencies required for installation.
No matter how Reticulum is installed and started, it will load external
dependencies only if they are needed and available. If for example you want
to use Reticulum on a system that cannot support
pyserial, it is perfectly possible to
do so using the rnspure package, but Reticulum will not be able to use
serial-based interfaces. All other available modules will still be loaded when
needed.
Please Note! If you use the rnspure package to run Reticulum on systems
that do not support PyCA/cryptography,
it is important that you read and understand the Cryptographic
Primitives section of this document.
Reticulum is not a service you subscribe to, nor is it a single global network you "join". Reticulum provides functionality for discovering available public interfaces over the network itself, and the broader community has provided various directories of publicly available entrypoints to bootstrap connectivity.
To learn how to establish initial connectivity over Reticulum, read the Bootstrapping Connectivity section of the manual.
If you already have a general idea of how this works, you can use community-run sites such as directory.rns.recipes and rmap.world to find interface definitions for initial connectivity to the global distributed Reticulum backbone.
Important! Historically, a developer-targeted testnet was made available by the Reticulum project itself. As the amount of global Reticulum nodes and entrypoints have grown to a substantial quantity, this public testnet, including the Amsterdam Testnet entrypoint, has now been decommissioned. If your still have instances that relied on this entrypoint for connectivity, transition to using the distributed backbone instead. Reticulum now includes a full on-network interface discovery and connectivity bootstrapping system. Read the Bootstrapping Connectivity section of the manual for pointers.
For this to be possible, I need your help. Please support the continued development of open, free and private communications systems by donating via one of the following channels:
Monero:
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Bitcoin
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Ethereum
0x91C421DdfB8a30a49A71d63447ddb54cEBe3465E
Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/Reticulum/
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/markqvist
Reticulum uses a simple suite of efficient, strong and well-tested cryptographic primitives, with widely available implementations that can be used both on general-purpose CPUs and on microcontrollers.
One of the primary considerations for choosing this particular set of primitives is that they can be implemented safely with relatively few pitfalls, on practically all current computing platforms.
The primitives listed here are authoritative. Anything claiming to be Reticulum, but not using these exact primitives is not Reticulum, and possibly an intentionally compromised or weakened clone. The utilised primitives are:
os.urandom() or betterIn the default installation configuration, the X25519, Ed25519,
and AES-256-CBC primitives are provided by OpenSSL
(via the PyCA/cryptography package).
The hashing functions SHA-256 and SHA-512 are provided by the standard
Python hashlib. The HKDF,
HMAC, Token primitives, and the PKCS7 padding function are always
provided by the following internal implementations:
Reticulum also includes a complete implementation of all necessary primitives in pure Python. If OpenSSL and PyCA are not available on the system when Reticulum is started, Reticulum will instead use the internal pure-python primitives. A trivial consequence of this is performance, with the OpenSSL backend being much faster. The most important consequence however, is the potential loss of security by using primitives that has not seen the same amount of scrutiny, testing and review as those from OpenSSL.
Please note that by default, installing Reticulum will require OpenSSL and
PyCA to also be automatically installed if not already available. It is only
possible to use the pure-python primitives if this requirement is specifically
overridden by the user, for example by installing the rnspure package instead
of the normal rns package, or by running directly from local source-code.
If you want to use the internal pure-python primitives, it is highly advisable that you have a good understanding of the risks that this pose, and make an informed decision on whether those risks are acceptable to you.
Reticulum is relatively young software, and should be considered as such. While it has been built with cryptography best-practices very foremost in mind, it has not been externally security audited, and there could very well be privacy or security breaking bugs. If you want to help out, or help sponsor an audit, please do get in touch.
Reticulum can only exist because of the mountain of Open Source work it was built on top of, the contributions of everyone involved, and everyone that has supported the project through the years. To everyone who has helped, thank you so much.
A number of other modules and projects are either part of, or used by Reticulum. Sincere thanks to the authors and contributors of the following projects: