Draft:Reticulum Network Stack

• Comment: Still obviously AI written. Remove the bold text from the body. Needs some context for general readers. Ktkvtsh (talk) 23:25, 6 December 2025 (UTC)

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The Reticulum Network Stack, also known as simply Reticulum or RNS, is an experimental, open-source, cryptography-based, mesh networking protocol stack.

Devices running Reticulum can connect in an overlay network upon the Internet where Reticulum runs on the application layer to encrypt traffic between nodes. The network stack is also used to create off-grid networks where nodes communicate independently from the Internet using commercially-available, low-cost radios.

Features

Reticulum is medium-agnostic and supports direct peer-to-peer links over TCP/IP, serial, Ethernet, and I2P, as well as wirelessly over LoRa and packet radio interfaces.

Reticulum was created by Mark Qvist in 2021 to address security and resiliency issues in the Internet Protocol. The reference implementation of Reticulum is written in Python and can be run on any system that supports Python, including single-board computers. It supports a wide range of bandwidths and can operate on data links with throughputs as low as 5 bit/s.

Implementation

The Reticulum network stack is a message-oriented system that operates on destinations, which can send individual, encrypted packets to each other or establish longer-lived links which serve as encrypted channels between destinations. All data transmitted using Reticulum is encrypted with elliptic-curve cryptography and AES-256 by default.

Destinations in Reticulum are represented by unique 16-byte hexadecimal hashes, such as <13425ec15b621c1d928589718000d814>. Destinations can periodically announce their public key over available network interfaces, which can then be used by other nodes to encrypt messages meant for that destination. Each announce is signed with an Ed25519 signature to verify authenticity. Announces propagate throughout the network, over a default limit of 128 hops.

Reticulum supports initiator anonymity, and only a destination address is necessary to send data over packets or links. When a destination accepts a link request packet, it can then derive a symmetric key for the link via ECDH using a per-link X25519 key pair. These per-link keys, along with the public key of the link originator, are then used to verify the link over every intermediate node. Once a link is verified, packets sent over the link are then addressed to the link ID, which allows communication without requiring knowledge of the initiator's destination hash.

Links or packets can optionally have forward secrecy through the use of ratchets on a per-destination basis.

Adoption

On November 4, 2024, students at Florida Atlantic University devloped RTAK, a plugin for the the Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) that adds compatibility with Reticulum over portable, solar-powered, waterproof LoRa radio nodes.

The project was able to bridge ATAK over Reticulum with the goal of enabling first responders to communicate and maintain tactical awareness in situations where cellular or satellite networks are unavailable, such as for rescue operations during natural disasters.

About 230 Reticulum nodes were visible from the public Internet on December 2025, with most clustered in Europe and the United States.

See also

• Meshtastic – similar, popular mesh network protocol (LoRa links only)
• Long-range Wi-Fi – used for long-distance backbone links in Reticulum.

External links

• Official website
• Source code on GitHub
• Documentation
• Reticulum Network World Map Project (RMAP)
• LXMF, a messaging protocol built for Reticulum on GitHub
• NomadNet, a terminal-based messaging tool and browser for pages hosted on Reticulum nodes on GitHub
• MeshChat, a desktop communications app for Reticulum on GitHub