Reticulum is a cryptography-based networking stack for wide-area networks built on readily available hardware, that 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 need 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.

It can be used over practically any medium that can support at least a half-duplex channel with 500 bits per second throughput, and an MTU of 500 bytes. Data radios, modems, LoRa radios, serial lines, AX.25 TNCs, amateur radio digital modes, ad-hoc WiFi, free-space optical links and similar systems are all examples of the types of interfaces Reticulum was designed for. An open-source LoRa-based interface called RNode has been designed specifically for use with Reticulum.

No kernel modules or drivers are required. Reticulum runs completely in userland, and can run on practically any system that runs Python 3. Reticulum runs well even on small single-board computers like the Pi Zero.

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.

So 3rd part apps can be built which use this networking stack to communicate. One such example is LXMF, which is a distributed, delay and disruption tolerant message transfer protocol built on Reticulum. Nomad Network is an example of an off-grid, encrypted and resilient mesh communications platform. The Android, Linux and macOS app Sideband has a graphical interface and focuses on ease of use.

See https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum

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