Yeah it seems like you are in fact right...

[1] https://rns.recipes/forum/general/rns-150-testing-traffic-pr...

I would say it has a fairly reasonable number of protections with things like being able to prioritise certain interfaces and controlling the announce rate from a node and rate limiting the number of announces a destination makes. What in particular is abusable?

The worst part privacy wise could be the announce packets which include a hop count and the address for the origin so if you had enough interfaces you could roughly say where a node is on a network graph (geo locating that is an entire other problem)

Privacy also depends on what interfaces you communicate over, eg TCP reveals IP addresses to the nodes you directly connect to (combine with hop counts to see if a packet definitely originated from that node), LoRa gives an idea of how close it might be because of its range limits and the fact radio emissions can be located.

I suppose it means it's easier to develop the protocol only having to update one Python codebase but it does mean other implementations are kinda in a state where there isn't anything to properly verify they work.

There's also a issue with quite a few vibe coded implementations that don't actually properly work filling the space.

No? Pretty sure that isn't true.

You get an address by creating a random private key public key combination (no collisions are ensured by entropy).

You then send an announce packet over all the connections to other nodes you have. This packet tells everyone else how to reach you and that you exist. To send packets to you they send to the connection they got your announce came from, then the node on the other end of that connection sends to where it got the announce from and so on until it reaches the origin node where the destination must be.

The manual at https://reticulum.network/manual/index.html is the best source of information on Reticulum but it isn't very beginner friendly.

It uses AES because AES is extremely well tested and vulnerabilities have not been found.

The new quantum safe algorithms are still mostly in beta and a few have already been broken. They also have extremely large key lengths which breaks the fundamental idea of Reticulum being able to run over any almost any connection, including LoRa. See what the creator of Reticulum said on the topic [2].

[1] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography/faq... "To protect against the threat of quantum computers, should we double the key length for AES now? (added 11/18/18)"

[2] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/181#discu...

As far as I can tell, RNS is a networking protocol that attempts to provide a mesh network that can run over almost any bidirectional connection (and interconnect different types of connections) without centralisation (basically random addresses using encryption, and announces to make that address reachable).

It's kinda similar to Meshtastic and Meshcore but designed to be more generic for any connection. Compared to Meshcore it's less bandwidth efficient since it uses larger addresses but I like RNS more because it's more generic (it's intended to be fairly bandwidth efficient but at a larger more internet level scale than just kilobytes per second) and less proprietary than the Meshcore official ecosystem. Compared to Meshtastic, RNS is much more efficient since it doesn't use flood routing for every packet.

[1] https://reticulum.network/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48299638

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https://reticulum.network/start.html has an overview and how to connect.

There is a manual with a lot more information on how it works and the ideas behind it at https://reticulum.network/manual/ however it's quite large and not really a user friendly guide

If you just want to play with it https://reticulum.network/manual/software.html has a list of clients and software using it.