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Identity and Authentication on Reticulum
Why the mesh is anonymous by default
Reticulum does not tell a node who you are unless you decide to say so. That is
not an accident or a missing feature. It is one of the protocol's stated design
goals, written into the Reticulum manual under "Goals":
Initiator Anonymity
It must be possible to communicate over a Reticulum network without
revealing any identifying information about oneself.
The manual repeats the point when it describes how a link is built, in the
section "Link Establishment in Detail":
It's important to note that this methodology ensures that the source of
the request does not need to reveal any identifying information about
itself. The link initiator remains completely anonymous.
So when you browse a page on someone's node, the node operator learns that
somebody asked for a page. Not who. Your client had to go out of its way to
tell them anything more.
This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it inverts the assumption most
people carry over from the web. On the web you are identified by default and
anonymity takes effort. On Reticulum anonymity is the resting state and
identification takes effort. Every consequence in the rest of this book follows
from that single inversion.
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