Reticulum Network Stack 
[!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.
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
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.
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>.
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.
The implementations listed here have demonstrated wire-compatibility, sufficient feature parity, sensible security and development practices, long-term commitment and care for implementation quality. Additionally, they have a track record of at least 18 months of active development.
Most importantly, their developers and maintainers are recognized by the community to actually know what they are doing, and as having a commitment to improving the overall Reticulum ecosystem.
If you are the maintainer of an implementation not listed above, and believe that it deserves inclusion by following the same standards of rigor and commitment, your proposal will be welcomed.
Warning! A significant number of hastily launched, incorrect, dubious, directly harmful and, in most cases, entirely LLM-generated fakes of Reticulum implementations (and user facing applications) are currently being marketed and pushed under polished, but ultimately misleading or outright deceptive claims. Most of these are either quick attention or money grabs, completely unreviewed, incompatible, without maintenance or human oversight, actively trying to fragment the community, or a combination thereof.
For more extensive information on this topic, read the Brandolini’s Reference chapter of the manual (for the legal foundations, see Void Grants specifically). The chapter is very long, very detailed, and is the polite, measured analysis, intended as an evolving, sectioned reference on these issues.
If you would rather just have the short, unfiltered and quite angry version, which consists of an enacted response to one particular manifestation of the phenomenon as a whole, used as an example, you can read Yes, I am Angry. It gets the same point across, in a very different language, if you can handle that sort of communication.
The core Reticulum maintainers and developers strongly advise against using any such “implementation”. The deceitful and self-serving behavior of a small number of either malintented, attention-seeking or incompetent individuals has caused significant damage and waste of time and resources for both developers, node operators, users and the community and Reticulum project at large.
We kindly, but urgently ask all users to excercise caution, common sense and healthy skepticism when evaluating the potential use of any implementation not listed above; and to accept that choosing to do so regardless translates the responsibility for potential damage from an irresponsible or malicious individual onto yourself.
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.
- The included rngit system provides a full solution for managing, hosting, collaborating on and interacting with Git repositories 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, WiFi or Bluetooth 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.
Contributions of 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
All performance numbers here assume rnsd running in fully interpreted Python mode, limited to a single CPU core.
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 100 bits per second, to 10 gigabits per second on normal hardware.
Currently, the on-network, usable performance envelope is approximately 150 bits per second to 1 gigabit per second on modest hardware. Real-world performance will vary widely with the speed of your system, availability of cryptographic hardware acceleration, and other factors.
Raw routing throughput for a transport node hosted on a Raspberry Pi 5 is approximately 5 gigabits per second. Systems with modern crypto hardware acceleration can achieve transport throughput of 15 gigabits per second and higher.
While the reference implementation is perfectly capable of reaching 100+ Gbps, by utilizing multiple CPU cores and vectorized transport, performance beyond the current level is not higly prioritised, since RNS is already able to saturate available physical medium bandwidth in almost all real-world situations.
The primary objectives for RNS are reliability, correctness, security, proper traffic management and actually practical performance, not hollow on-paper “benchmarks” with little to no bearing on real-world usability.
All alternative-implementation maintainers are highly encouraged to adopt a similar approach, and especially to focus on getting their implementations working properly and reliably before publishing empirically dubious or factually wrong performance claims.
Current Status
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.
Dependencies
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.
Bootstrapping Connectivity
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.
Public Testnet
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.
Support Reticulum
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:
84FpY1QbxHcgdseePYNmhTHcrgMX4nFfBYtz2GKYToqHVVhJp8Eaw1Z1EedRnKD19b3B8NiLCGVxzKV17UMmmeEsCrPyA5w
-
Bitcoin
bc1pgqgu8h8xvj4jtafslq396v7ju7hkgymyrzyqft4llfslz5vp99psqfk3a6
-
Ethereum
0x91C421DdfB8a30a49A71d63447ddb54cEBe3465E
-
Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/Reticulum/
-
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/markqvist
Cryptographic Primitives
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:
- Reticulum Identity Keys are 512-bit Curve25519 keysets
- A 256-bit Ed25519 key for signatures
- A 256-bit X22519 key for ECDH key exchanges
- HKDF for key derivation
- Encrypted tokens are based on the Fernet spec
- Ephemeral keys derived from an ECDH key exchange on Curve25519
- HMAC using SHA256 for message authentication
- IVs must be generated through
os.urandom() or better
- AES-256 in CBC mode with PKCS7 padding
- No Fernet version and timestamp metadata fields
- SHA-256
- SHA-512
In 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.
Having been in development for ten, and wider deployment for around five years, Reticulum is relatively young software, and should be considered as such. While it has been carefully built with cryptography best-practices very foremost in mind, there could very well still be privacy or security breaking bugs.
Acknowledgements & Credits
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:
- PyCA/cryptography, BSD License
- Pure-25519 by Brian Warner, MIT License
- Pysha2 by Thom Dixon, MIT License
- Python AES-128 by Or Gur Arie, MIT License
- Python AES-256 by BoppreH, MIT License
- Curve25519.py by Nicko van Someren, Public Domain
- I2Plib by Viktor Villainov
- PySerial by Chris Liechti, BSD License
- Configobj by Michael Foord, Nicola Larosa, Rob Dennis & Eli Courtwright, BSD License
- ifaddr by Stefan C. Mueller, MIT License
- Umsgpack.py by Ivan A. Sergeev
- rnsh by Aaron Heise
- Python
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