Reticulum Network Stack

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

Reference Implementation

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>.

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.

Examples of Reticulum Applications

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:

• LXMF is a distributed, delay and disruption tolerant message transfer protocol built on Reticulum
• The LXST protocol and framework provides real-time audio and signals transport over Reticulum. It includes primitives and utilities for building voice-based applications and hardware devices, such as the rnphone program, that can be used to build hardware telephones.
• For an off-grid, encrypted and resilient mesh communications platform, see Nomad Network
• The Android, Linux, macOS and Windows app Sideband has a graphical interface and many advanced features, such as file transfers, image and voice messages, real-time voice calls, a distributed telemetry system, mapping capabilities and full plugin extensibility.
• MeshChatX is a full-featured LXMF client with many built-in tools and functionalities, that also supports image and voice messages, file transfers and voice calls. It also includes a built-in page browser for browsing Nomad Network nodes.
• You can use the included rnsh program to establish remote shell sessions over Reticulum.

Where can Reticulum be used?

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.

How do I get started?

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.

Included Utilities

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.

• The system daemon rnsd for running Reticulum as an always-available service
• An interface status utility called rnstatus, that displays information about interfaces
• The path lookup and management tool rnpath letting you view and modify path tables
• A diagnostics tool called rnprobe for checking connectivity to destinations
• A simple file transfer program called rncp making it easy to transfer files between systems
• The identity management and encryption utility rnid let's you manage Identities and encrypt/decrypt files
• The rnsh program allows you to establish fully interactive shell session with remote systems
• The remote command execution program rnx let's you run simple commands and programs and retrieve output from remote systems
• The rngit program provides a full multi-repository Git node for serving repositories over Reticulum
• The included git-remote-rns helper allows you to interact with Git repositories over Reticulum

All 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.

Supported interface types and devices

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:

• Any Ethernet device
• 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

Performance

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 upg