Reticulum is a cryptography-based networking stack for wide-area networks built on readily available hardware, and can operate even with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth.
Reticulum allows you to build very wide-area networks with off-the-shelf tools, and offers end-to-end encryption, autoconfiguring cryptographically backed multi-hop transport, efficient addressing, unforgeable packet acknowledgements and more.
Reticulum is a complete networking stack, and does not use IP or higher layers, although it is easy to utilise IP (with TCP or UDP) as the underlying carrier for Reticulum. It is therefore trivial to tunnel Reticulum over the Internet or private IP networks. Reticulum is built directly on cryptographic principles, allowing resilience and stable functionality 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.
Reticulum should currently be considered beta software. All core protocol features are implemented and functioning, but additions will probably occur as real-world use is explored. There will be bugs. The API and wire-format can be considered relatively stable at the moment, but could change if warranted.
Reticulum is an experimental networking stack, 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-breaking bugs. To be considered even remotely secure, Reticulum needs a very thourough security review by independt cryptographers and security researchers. If you want to help out, or help sponsor an audit, please do get in touch.
Reticulum can also be encapsulated over existing IP networks, so there's
nothing stopping you from using it over wired ethernet or your local WiFi
network, 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.
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.
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 relatively simple to implement an interface class. Currently, the following interfaces are supported:
* Any ethernet device
* LoRa using `RNode <https://unsigned.io/rnode>`_
* Packet Radio TNCs, such as `OpenModem <https://unsigned.io/openmodem>`_
