Reticulum: A Crypto-Based Network Stack for Sovereign, Unstoppable Mesh Networks
Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
Reticulum is a cryptography-based networking stack that enables anyone to build local or wide-area networks using readily available hardware, even under adverse conditions with high latency and extremely low bandwidth. It aims to let individuals and communities operate their own sovereign communication networks, free from surveillance, censorship, and control. Unlike traditional stacks, Reticulum uses no source addresses, has no central address authority, and ensures end-to-end connectivity with self-sovereign, portable addresses. All communication is encrypted by default with forward secrecy, and unencrypted packets are dropped as invalid.
Reticulum is Unstoppable Networks for The People.
- nunobrito
Just to share some experience: 100% privacy on these kind of networks is more a sympton of talking to software engineers than the radio reality observed on mesh networks.
Very often what comes as top priority is communication itself, which means radio-amateur radio frequencies where encryption is only available for signing messages but not the content.
Reticulum can be 100% private as it can choose to send packets in plain text. Can also broadcast messages without a specific target receiver, these are features that are necessary for radio transmission on amateur frequencies.
On LoRa: attention that default reticulum is still "too talkative". Meaning that in some LoRa frequencies there is a legal limit to how many messages (transmission time) your device can send per hour and even the automated announcements (to say "Hello, I'm here") quickly waste that available space.
On Internet: reticulum is great. I'm seeing about 700 connected devices across different hubs.
People often compare reticulum to Meshcore or Meshtastic but they often neglect one important aspect: those are exclusive LoRa implementations. Reticulum is the same protocol (language) no matter the network underneath. This means that you can connect a phone via BLE to a LoRa link which on the other side is connected on the Internet and then flies down to another BLE somewhere. This is not common to find on reticulum but possible.
There is a lot of good work on the topic. Maybe it will surface here on HN soon when mo […]
- Sargos
https://ratspeak.org/ seems like a modern fork of Reticulum built in Rust and with a fairly active community
- QwenGlazer9000
I had a lot of hope for reticulum, but it's a one man project with a near burned out maintainer, taking on an absolutely monstrous task.
I'm now cautiously optimistic. This or something similar is likely the long term future of mesh networks, but in the short to medium term, meshcore is the way to go.
- Klaus23
While the project is interesting from a technical perspective, there are some serious issues. The main implementation has a vague, non-standard licence, but this is not overly problematic as alternative implementations can simply be used instead. A bigger problem with Reticulum is that it does not appear to offer robust protection against abuse. Messages are protected by cryptography, but there are many other ways to render a network unusable, which will inevitably happen on a larger scale.
- kangaroozach
Why are there not more developers? Is ratspeak where they all prefer to be?
Also reticulum and crypto seem like they go together. Non-http crypto transactions?
What about entirely-non-http blockchains?
A new bitcoin that is completely off the internet as we know it??