this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Meshtastic

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Couple questions about meshtastic (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I’ve recently come across this awesome project and have been doing a whole lot of research but there are still some questions lingering that im hoping could be cleared up by the community.

  1. How safe is the encryption? Do two nodes upon initialization exchange public keys and then stored on the individual devices indefinitely? What happens if one of the nodes needs to factory reset and generate new keys. Will it let the other side know that the keys have been manipulated and require for a renegotiation to happen?
  2. Is the concept of a multiple node chat/group chat possible? If not currently is it someone thing could become possible in the future?
  3. voice chat; ive seen some hardware mentioning voice chat, has anyone tried this and could it be a replacement for gmrs radios with the added benefit of license free repeaters?

Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Please correct me if I'm wrong, this is my understanding

1 It's a lot better than nothing! Meshtastic firmware sets every node to the LongFast, pubpic encryption channel by default. If it gets fuly factory reset that should still be default. If you want an additional channel with different settings the QR scan feature lets everyone sync settings easily.

You might even be able to manually plug in the encryption key but I haven't tried that to see.

2 You can DM nodes in range over the default LongFast channel. You can also set up a separate channel for a group. For example I have one with all my nodes that serves as a family/friends group and also allows for range testing without spamming everyone in range.

3 Voice probably won't be a thing, is the bandwidth is very small and it would be a real struggle to get it to work in a useful way. Still could happen though! Regular radios still work best for voice

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
  1. How safe is the encryption? Do two nodes upon initialization exchange public keys and then stored on the individual devices indefinitely? What happens if one of the nodes needs to factory reset and generate new keys. Will it let the other side know that the keys have been manipulated and require for a renegotiation to happen?

Can't answer the "how safe" part without a security audit, but the UI will show a red padlock in the node list (or something like that) if the public key for a node changes. To renegotiate, just "forget" the node and they'll re-sync.

See also: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/encryption/

  1. Is the concept of a multiple node chat/group chat possible?

Each channel has a "group" chat that's accessible to every node that has the channel key. The messages in the channel chat are encrypted with the channel pre-shared key (unlike direct messages which in recent firmwares use the public/private keypairs for each node)

  1. voice chat;

The official voice chat support is only available on certain hardware where the LoRa radio operates in the 2.4 GHz band. This is because the sub-GHz band doesn't have enough bandwidth for it (even with Codec2 compression). I don't have any hardware that can support that, so no experience with it or if it's capable of replacing GMRS radios. I'm also unclear on what kind of range LoRa would get in th 2.4 GHz band. I believe the voice chat is still experimental as well.