RiV-mesh - Decentralized IPv6 Mesh Network

Introduction

RiV-mesh is the legacy implementation of a fully end-to-end encrypted IPv6 mesh network, designed to provide secure connectivity between a wide spectrum of endpoint devices like IoT devices, desktop computers or even routers. It is lightweight, self-arranging, supported on multiple platforms and allows pretty much any IPv6-capable application to communicate securely with other network nodes.

Supported Platforms

RiV-mesh works on a number of platforms, including Linux, macOS, Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, VyOS, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and OpenWrt.

Building

If you want to build from source, as opposed to installing one of the pre-built packages:

1. Install Go (requires Go 1.19 or later)
2. Clone this repository
3. Run ./build

Note that you can cross-compile for other platforms and architectures by specifying the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables, e.g. GOOS=windows ./build or GOOS=linux GOARCH=mipsle ./build

... or generate an iOS framework with:

./contrib/mobile/build -i

... or generate an Android AAR bundle with:

./contrib/mobile/build -a

Running

Generate configuration

To generate static configuration, either generate a HJSON file (human-friendly, complete with comments):

./mesh -genconf > /path/to/mesh.conf

... or generate a plain JSON file (which is easy to manipulate programmatically):

./mesh -genconf -json > /path/to/mesh.conf

You will need to edit the mesh.conf file to add or remove peers, modify other configuration such as listen addresses or multicast addresses, etc.

Run RiV-mesh

To run with the generated static configuration:

./mesh -useconffile /path/to/mesh.conf

To run in auto-configuration mode (which will use sane defaults and random keys at each startup, instead of using a static configuration file):

./mesh -autoconf

You will likely need to run RiV-mesh as a privileged user or under sudo, unless you have permission to create TUN/TAP adapters. On Linux this can be done by giving the RiV-mesh binary the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.

Known issues

1. Log message:

An error occurred starting multicast: listen udp6 [::]:9001: socket: address family not supported by protocol

and

An error occurred starting TUN/TAP: operation not supported

Caused by:

The device has no IPv6 support

2. Log message:

An error occurred starting TUN/TAP: permission denied

Caused by:

IPv6 support is not enabled. See the solution: yggdrasil-network#479 (comment)

3. Mesh infinite output in log:

Connected SCTP ...

Disconnected SCTP ...

Caused by:

Docker interface docker0 is conflicting with SCTP bind process. The issue can be resolved by removing docker.

License

RiV-mesh is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 (LGPLv3):

• License: LGPLv3 (standard version, no special exceptions)
• Commercial Use: Allowed with full LGPLv3 compliance requirements
• Application Code Sharing: Must share source code of applications using RiV-mesh
• Build Instructions: Must provide installation and build information
• Modifications: Any modifications to RiV-mesh must remain open source