Reticulum is a networking stack suited for high-latency, low-bandwidth links. Reticulum is at it’s core a message oriented system. It is suited for both local point-to-point or point-to-multipoint scenarios where alle nodes are within range of each other, as well as scenarios where packets need to be transported over multiple hops in a complex network to reach the recipient.

Reticulum does away with the idea of addresses and ports known from IP, TCP and UDP. Instead Reticulum uses the singular concept of destinations. Any application using Reticulum as it’s networking stack will need to create one or more destinations to receive data, and know the destinations it needs to send data to.

All destinations in Reticulum are represented as a 10 byte hash, derived from truncating a full SHA-256 hash of identifying characteristics of the destination. To users, the destination addresses will be displayed as 10 bytes in hexadecimal representation, as in the following example: <80e29bf7cccaf31431b3>.

The truncation size of 10 bytes (80 bits) for destinations has been choosen as a reasonable tradeoff between address space and packet overhead. The address space accomodated by this size can support many billions of simultaneously active devices on the same network, while keeping packet overhead low, which is essential on low-bandwidth networks. In the very unlikely case that this address space nears congestion, a one-line code change can upgrade the Reticulum address space all the way up to 256 bits, ensuring the Reticulum address space could potentially support galactic-scale networks. This is obviusly complete and ridiculous over-allocation, and as such, the current 80 bits should be sufficient, even far into the future.

By default Reticulum encrypts all data using elliptic curve cryptography. Any packet sent to a destination is encrypted with a derived ephemeral key. Reticulum can also set up an encrypted channel to a destination with Forward Secrecy and Initiator Anonymity using a elliptic curve cryptography and ephemeral keys derived from a Diffie Hellman exchange on Curve25519. In Reticulum terminology, this is called a Link. The multi-hop transport, coordination, verification and reliability layers are fully autonomous and also based on elliptic curve cryptography.

Reticulum also offers symmetric key encryption for group-oriented communications, as well as unencrypted packets for broadcast purposes, or situations where you need the communication to be in plain text.

Reticulum can connect to a variety of interfaces such as radio modems, data radios and serial ports, and offers the possibility to easily tunnel Reticulum traffic over IP links such as the Internet or private IP networks.

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