Solarpunk

Is this still an overlay network, or an actual replacement?

Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth.

The vision of Reticulum is to allow anyone to operate their own sovereign communication networks, and to make it cheap and easy to cover vast areas with a myriad of independent, interconnectable and autonomous networks. Reticulum is Unstoppable Networks for The People.

Sounds like an own network! Really cool!

Very interesting! I've never heard of this before.

This is a very cool concept and it seems quite mature for something in beta. I do however have my doubts over choosing to use python for something as often used as the network stack. As I understand it, one of the goals for this project is efficiency, and while python is very efficient to write, it is notably very inefficient during runtime.

Interesting project, thank you for introducing. :)

I haven't tested anything, but only checked their specs (sadly I didn't find out how they manage without a distributed hashtable).

Reticulum does not use source addresses. No packets transmitted include information about the address, place, machine or person they originated from.

Sounds like mix networks like I2P and (to a lesser degree, since its role is proxying out to the Internet) like TOR. Mix networks send traffic using the Internet, so the bottom protocol layers (TCP and UDP) use IP addresses. Higher protocol layers (end to end messages) use cryptographic identifiers.

There is no central control over the address space in Reticulum. Anyone can allocate as many addresses as they need, when they need them.

Sounds like TOR and I2P, but people's convenience (easily resolving a name to an address) has created centralized resources on these nets, and will likely create similar resources on any network. An important matter is whether the central name resolver can retroactively revoke a name (in I2P for example, a name that has been already distributed is irrevocable, but you can refuse to distribute it to new nodes).

Reticulum ensures end-to-end connectivity. Newly generated addresses become globally reachable in a matter of seconds to a few minutes.

The same as aforementioned mix networks, but neither of them claims operability at 5 bits per second. Generally, a megabit connection is advised to meaninfully run a mix network, because you're not expected to freeload, but help mix traffic for others (this is how the anonymity arises).

Addresses are self-sovereign and portable. Once an address has been created, it can be moved physically to another place in the network, and continue to be reachable.

True for TOR and I2P. The address is a public key. You can move the machine with the private key anywhere, it will build a tunnel to accept incoming traffic at some other node.

All communication is secured with strong, modern encryption by default.

As it should.

All encryption keys are ephemeral, and communication offers forward secrecy by default.

In mix networks, the keys used as endpoint addresses are not ephemeral, but permanent. I'm not sure if I should take this statement at face value. If Alice wants to speak to Bob tomorrow, some identifier of Bob must not be ephemeral.

It is not possible to establish unencrypted links in Reticulum networks.

Same for mix networks.

It is not possible to send unencrypted packets to any destinations in the network.

Same.

Destinations receiving unencrypted packets will drop them as invalid.

Same.

P.S.

I also checked their interface list and it looks reasonable. Dropping an idea too: an interface for WiFi cards in monitor/inject mode might help some people. If the tool gets popular, I'm sure someone will build it. :)

@boxy tell me if I'm missing something, but it seems like maintaining routing tables won't scale well.

Here's my thinking: there's no hierarchy to destination addresses (I.e. there no equivalent to /16 or /24 subnets), which means every transport node needs to keep track of all the individual addresses instead of just route prefixes. If there are billions of destinations, at 16 bytes each, that would require about 100G of ram.

You could reduce this by maybe a factor of 10 by using a big bloom filter that contains pairs of (address, route). But 10G is still pretty large. And you'd need two of them if you ever wanted to expire old entries.

I have been interested in mesh networks for a long while but I want to connect with other peoples mesh networks and access public websites on the protocol without an ISP . Like a mesh router box I pay for one time and connect via radio or something and access a very basic Usenet or early 2000s lean design internet. Is it possible?

Only connections under five bits per second? Whew, where do you even get one! Seems near useless... ;P I assume that's some kinda typo, at the least.

Kinda curious about the tech, though. If it's not bullshit it could be interesting. ... Though how they're gonna do much at five bits per second... gonna fill up a ton of memory quick unless it's just for tiny messages and load-balances very well. Actually, this just smells worse and worse as I think about it. Hmmmmm. Will have to poke my snoot in there when I get home. 🤔