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Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

reticulum.network

51–60 of 89 posts

Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

#51

Just to share some experience: 100% privacy on these kind of networks is more a sympton of talking to software engineers than the radio reality observed on mesh networks. Very often what comes as top priority is communication itself, which means radio-amateur radio frequencies where encryption is only available for signing messages but not the content. Reticulum can be 100% private as it can choose to send packets in…

So what Matter is to Thread, Reticulum is to LoRa?

Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

#52
What is confusing to me is that this is intended to be run (I believe) on LoRa devices, but it requires a PC with python running. I researched this for a project at work involving these devices. (Sx128x or sx1262 LorA radios connected to an ARM MCU). I skipped it and used the radios directly due to the Python requirement; these devices, which seem like they would be the Reticulum target, run bare-metal or RTOS, i.e. C, C++ or Rust with no or minimal OS, and no python.

There's a rust port of the Reticulum, but it's std rust, which has a similar problem to Python.

edit: The core problem isn't so much that it requires Python and a GPOS; it's that they don't publish a spec, and instead direct you to use their Python package; the code is the spec is another way of phrasing that.

Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

#53

What is confusing to me is that this is intended to be run (I believe) on LoRa devices, but it requires a PC with python running. I researched this for a project at work involving these devices. (Sx128x or sx1262 LorA radios connected to an ARM MCU). I skipped it and used the radios directly due to the Python requirement; these devices, which seem like they would be the Reticulum target, run bare-metal or RTOS, i.e.…

Reticulum uses attached LoRa devices, via USB for example if I'm not mistaken. It doesn't directly run on the LoRa devices.

PC not really required. 512MB of RAM and enough Linux to get Python will run Reticulum, on Raspberry Pi's for example.

Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

#54

Just to share some experience: 100% privacy on these kind of networks is more a sympton of talking to software engineers than the radio reality observed on mesh networks. Very often what comes as top priority is communication itself, which means radio-amateur radio frequencies where encryption is only available for signing messages but not the content. Reticulum can be 100% private as it can choose to send packets in…

Yeah, I got the impression that Reticulum's main claim is that it replaces the IP stack with a future-proof, encrypted protocol for routing regardless of the underlying network medium. Which is not an insigificant claim to test, but boy would it be fantastic.

Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

#55
post #37

While the project is interesting from a technical perspective, there are some serious issues. The main implementation has a vague, non-standard licence, but this is not overly problematic as alternative implementations can simply be used instead. A bigger problem with Reticulum is that it does not appear to offer robust protection against abuse. Messages are protected by cryptography, but there are many other ways to…

Any publicly accessible protocol, such as Ethernet (wired and wireless) can only do so much to prevent DoS/DDoS on a given open multiple access medium.

You can certainly bake in fairness, congestion control, etc. in the protocol level, but protocols require 2 participants to follow rules/spec to work, and if one side doesn't follow the rules/spec, at the very least some bandwidth will be consumed.

The only way to absolutely prevent DoS/DDoS is to have more bandwidth than all possible simultaneous attackers, or limit physical access to the medium. Cellular networks, for example, keep direct physical access to its medium under tight lock and key through proprietary, non-open-source baseband firmware.

Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

#56

What is confusing to me is that this is intended to be run (I believe) on LoRa devices, but it requires a PC with python running. I researched this for a project at work involving these devices. (Sx128x or sx1262 LorA radios connected to an ARM MCU). I skipped it and used the radios directly due to the Python requirement; these devices, which seem like they would be the Reticulum target, run bare-metal or RTOS, i.e.…

I think that unlike Meshtastic or Meshcore, this one is transport agnostic.

Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

#57
post #19

https://ratspeak.org/ seems like a modern fork of Reticulum built in Rust and with a fairly active community

Does it? It's seemingly one person on Github and the "community" is otherwise on Discord and Telegram, which is pretty sus.

I seems to have the first part in common with Reticulum.

Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

#58

I had a lot of hope for reticulum, but it's a one man project with a near burned out maintainer, taking on an absolutely monstrous task. I'm now cautiously optimistic. This or something similar is likely the long term future of mesh networks, but in the short to medium term, meshcore is the way to go.

The protocol itself is more mature than the maintainer situation suggests. I built a complete independent implementation from the public spec in a few sessions. If one person can do that without touching the reference codebase, the foundation is solid. The risk is to Mark's implementation, not to Reticulum as a protocol.

That's good to hear. Having a proper protocol is the hardest and most important part. If everyone agrees on the protocol, different implementations can exist, forks can compete, and we get all the benefits of such without network fragmentation.

Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

#60

Just to share some experience: 100% privacy on these kind of networks is more a sympton of talking to software engineers than the radio reality observed on mesh networks. Very often what comes as top priority is communication itself, which means radio-amateur radio frequencies where encryption is only available for signing messages but not the content. Reticulum can be 100% private as it can choose to send packets in…

Yeah, I got the impression that Reticulum's main claim is that it replaces the IP stack with a future-proof, encrypted protocol for routing regardless of the underlying network medium. Which is not an insigificant claim to test, but boy would it be fantastic.

Would say your understanding is correct. It uses something similar to a "gossip" protocol where the public keys of other users are advertised.

So it gets ride of IP addresses and can jump boundaries between different network types. I'm using it for BLE to BLE communication, I've seen videos of people using it for USB to USB communication. There aren't many limitations as long as data can flow.

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