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Reticulum Protocol

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The Reticulum Protocol is a complete networking stack for building both local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware.

It offers end-to-end encryption, forward secrecy, initiator anonymity, autoconfiguring cryptographically backed multi-hop transport, efficient addressing, unforgeable packet acknowledgements and more. It is designed to continue to operate under adverse conditions, such as extremely low bandwidth and very high latency.cite-ref-0-1-0[1]

Reticulum can be used over a wide variety of communication mediums, from packet radio to fiber optics, 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, ad-hoc WiFi, free-space optical links and similar systems are all examples of the types of interfaces Reticulum was designed for. It is also trivial to tunnel Reticulum over the Internet or private IP networks.cite-ref-0-1-1[1]

The Reticulum Protocol is defined by the reference implementation and the manual ↗. It was dedicated to the public domain in 2016cite-ref-1-2-0[2] and reached 1.0 in 2025cite-ref-3[3].

For a deep dive, see Understanding Reticulum ↗ in the manual. To understand the foundational philosophy and goals of Reticulum, it is highly recommended to read the Zen of Reticulum ↗.

Contents

• Current status

• Implementations

• Cryptography

• See also

• References

Current status

All core protocol features are implemented and functioning, but additions will probably occur as real-world use is explored. The API and wire-format can be considered complete and stable, but could change if absolutely warranted.cite-ref-0-1-2[1]

There is work underway to conduct a formal verification of the protocol. It has not yet had an external security audit. See also: How secure is Reticulum?

Implementations

See also: Implementations

There are several implementations of Reticulum being developed besides RNS.

A Reticulum implementaton is expected to have full interoperability and sufficient functional parity with the reference implementation. Otherwise, it is not Reticulum.cite-ref-1-2-1[2]

Note: Anything claiming to be Reticulum but not using the exact cryptographic primitives of the reference implementation is not Reticulum, and possibly an intentionally compromised or weakened clone.cite-ref-2-4-0[4]

Cryptography

Reticulum uses a simple suite of efficient, strong and well-tested cryptographic primitives that are widely available:cite-ref-2-4-1[4]

• Reticulum Identity Keys are 512-bit Curve25519 keysets

• A 256-bit Ed25519 key for signatures

• A 256-bit X25519 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

• AES-256 in CBC mode with PKCS7 padding

• HMAC using SHA-256 for message authentication

• IVs must be generated through os.urandom() or better

• No Fernet version and timestamp metadata fields

• SHA-256

• SHA-512