Comment by jeroenhd
4 months ago
I just read through the documentation for Reticulum but I'm not sure what the point of it is. It looks like a Tor like network written in Python? As far as I can tell the entire thing runs virtually over TCP.
The manual says something about physical networks (is this intended to replace ethernet?) but it also mentions a current throughput of 40mbps so surely that's not what you're supposed to use it for.
Reticulum supports multiple interfaces to transport data, TCP is just one of them. Other are ethernet, packet radio TNCs (think ham radio), LoRa, stdio/pipes, I2p, etc. More details on some of the supported interfaces http://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html
None of the given descriptions have been too clear about what it is, though.
It appears to not be a drop-in solution for communication like Briar, so why make a comparison here in the first place?
Instead, it appears to be physical layer-agnostic (it doesn't care if it's run over internet or HAM-radio) infrastructure to build tools on top of. So,
* Is it an end-to-end encrypted overlay network like corporate VPN/Tailscale/Hamachi?
* Is it an end-to-end encrypted protocol between two or more endpoints like SSH?
* Is it an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol between two or more users like OTRv3?
The entire documentation returned zero results for "Tor" or "onion" (routing), so what's the improvement over Briar+Tor?