To receive and send data with the Reticulum stack, an application needs to create one or more destinations. Reticulum uses three different basic destination types, and one special:

Single

The single destination type is the most common type in Reticulum, and should be used for most purposes. It is always identified by a unique public key. Any data sent to this destination will be encrypted using ephemeral keys derived from an ECDH key exchange, and will only be readable by the creator of the destination, who holds the corresponding private key.

Plain

A plain destination type is unencrypted, and suited for traffic that should be broadcast to a number of users, or should be readable by anyone. Traffic to a plain destination is not encrypted. Generally, plain destinations can be used for broadcast information intended to be public. Plain destinations are only reachable directly, and packets adressed to plain destinations are never transported over multiple hops in the network. To be transportable over multiple hops in Reticulum, information must be encrypted, since Reticulum uses the per-packet encryption to verify routing paths and keep them alive.

Group

The group special destination type, that defines a symmetrically encrypted virtual destination. Data sent to this destination will be encrypted with a symmetric key, and will be readable by anyone in possession of the key, but as with the plain destination type, packets to this type of destination are not currently transported over multiple hops, although a planned upgrade to Reticulum will allow globally reachable group destinations.

Link

A link is a special destination type, that serves as an abstract channel to a single destination, directly connected or over multiple hops. The link also offers reliability and more efficient encryption, forward secrecy, initiator anonymity, and as such can be useful even when a node is directly reachable. It also offers a more capable API and allows easily carrying out requests and responses, large data transfers and more.

THIS IS A PART OF THE

Back to the Node Startpage