NNCP (Node to Node Copy)

NNCP (Node to Node Copy) is a collection of utilities for secure, store-and-forward exchange of files, mail, and commands between nodes. Think of it as a modern, cryptographically hardened UUCP with internet smarts. It is built for small, friend-to-friend (F2F) networks of a few dozen statically routed nodes — a deliberate, trust-based darknet rather than an anonymous open network — making it a strong fit for sovereign operators who want to move data only among known, vetted peers.

Store-and-forward, not sessions

Most networking assumes both ends are online at once. NNCP refuses that assumption. A sender encrypts a packet for its destination, drops it in a local spool, and forgets about it; the packet propagates whenever a path becomes available — over a LAN link tonight, a scheduled dial-up-style exchange tomorrow, or a USB stick carried in a pocket next week. This fire-and-forget, delay-tolerant design means the network never needs to be "up" in any conventional sense. Interrupted transfers resume where they stopped, very large files are handled gracefully, and each node acts as both client and server, pushing or polling as its situation allows.

Security model

Every packet is integrity-checked, end-to-end encrypted, and explicitly authenticated against known participants' public keys — there are no anonymous strangers on an NNCP network, by design. Packets that must be relayed through intermediate friends receive onion encryption, so a relay learns only enough to forward: not the contents, and not the ultimate endpoints. That combination — explicit trust at the membership layer, cryptographic opacity at the relay layer — is the opposite of the open internet's model, and it is precisely what makes NNCP suitable for data you would never route through infrastructure you do not control.

Sneakernet as a first-class transport

Because data can ride on physical media — USB stick, optical disc, tape — NNCP works for air-gapped machines that never touch a network at all. When the safest link is no link, a courier with a flash drive becomes a fully authenticated, encrypted network hop. For a sovereign operation, that covers real cases: shipping logs and backups out of an off-grid site on a weekly supply run, feeding software updates into an isolated signing machine, or moving a node's data between properties without leaving a traffic record with any ISP. Bandwidth is measured in kilograms and patience, but confidentiality and integrity are absolute.

Where NNCP fits in the sovereign stack

NNCP is a transport-agnostic upper layer, which is exactly why it pairs well with the radio side of the stack. A LoRa or packet radio link that surfaces intermittently is a perfectly good NNCP path; so is a Reticulum network stitched across mixed media, or a Meshtastic-style mesh for the last kilometre. Where those layers move packets, NNCP provides the disciplined store-and-forward service above them: queued mail, file sync, and remote command execution between machines that trust each other and nobody else. It is unglamorous infrastructure in the best sense — the kind you set up once, verify carefully, and then rely on for years while the rest of the internet churns.

An NNCP deployment starts small by design: generate a keypair per node, exchange public keys with your peers out-of-band, and describe the topology in a plain configuration file — who your neighbours are, how to reach them, and who relays for whom. From there the tooling handles spooling, encryption, and resumption, and the network grows one trusted node at a time. That deliberateness is the point. Where the modern internet optimizes for reaching anyone instantly, NNCP optimizes for reaching exactly the people you chose, eventually and verifiably, over whatever medium circumstances allow. For operators building infrastructure meant to survive outages, censorship, and provider failures — the same instinct that puts a miner behind your own node rather than someone else's — NNCP is a small, sharp tool that assumes the network is unreliable and simply does not care.