Fork me on GitHub
Download

Current version: 0.6.7a
Release notes

Connect with Friends and Family

Retroshare establish encrypted connections between you and your friends to create a network of computers, and provides various distributed services on top of it: forums, channels, chat, mail... Retroshare is fully decentralized, and designed to provide maximum security and anonymity to its users beyond direct friends. Retroshare is entirely free and open-source software. It is available on Android, Linux, MacOS and Windows. There are no hidden costs, no ads and no terms of service.

Retroshare screenshot

But there was something about this job that felt off. The Director had been vague about the details, and Jane couldn't shake the feeling that she was in over her head. She pushed the thoughts aside, focusing on the task at hand.

: These unique strings are sometimes used in "ghost" articles or placeholder pages to capture very specific long-tail search traffic from users looking for a particular order number or tracking ID. Jane Modelxx 20231207 2343292858 Min Link =link=

If I were to write a blog post “looking into” it, I’d approach it as a digital detective piece. Below is a mock blog post exploring possible interpretations.

Jane Modelxx 20231207 2343292858 Min Top -

But there was something about this job that felt off. The Director had been vague about the details, and Jane couldn't shake the feeling that she was in over her head. She pushed the thoughts aside, focusing on the task at hand.

: These unique strings are sometimes used in "ghost" articles or placeholder pages to capture very specific long-tail search traffic from users looking for a particular order number or tracking ID. Jane Modelxx 20231207 2343292858 Min Link =link= jane modelxx 20231207 2343292858 min top

If I were to write a blog post “looking into” it, I’d approach it as a digital detective piece. Below is a mock blog post exploring possible interpretations. But there was something about this job that felt off

How does it work?

Retroshare allows you to create a network of computers (called nodes). Every user has it's own node. The exact location (the IP-address) of nodes is only known to neighbor nodes. You invite a person to become a neighbor by exchanging your Retroshare certificates with that person.

Links between nodes are authenticated using strong asymmetric keys (PGP format) and encrypted using Perfect Forward Secrecy (OpenSSL implementation of TLS).

On top of the network mesh, Retroshare provides services to securely and anonymously exchange data with other nodes in the network beyond your own friends.

Seems too nice to be true. What's the catch?

There is no catch. Retroshare is provided free of charge and does not generate any kind of money. It is the result of hard work that is only driven by the goals of providing a tool to evade censorship.

The only catch is that you will need to build your own network: in order to use Retroshare, you have to recruit friends and exchange certificates with them, or join an existing network of friends.

Technical Specifications

About

Retroshare was founded by drbob in 2006, as a platform to provide "secure communications and file sharing with friends". Since then other developers joined and steadily improved the software. Retroshare v0.6 is a new milestone which is based on experience from previous releases. A remarkable new component in Retroshare v0.6 is the generic data transportation system (internally named GXS) which abstracts the distribution of authenticated data throughout the network. On top of GXS, Retroshare provides distributed forums, movie channels with comments, and asynchronous messaging.