It's been a while but for suggestions on my project, I had contacted Joshua Datko [of BeagleBone Cryptocape fame] and he suggested I check out Telehash (in the comments below). What it uncovered was interesting.

Telehash is a secure mesh protocol , you can read more about it here . What can be understood from it is that a logical link between any two nodes in the network is private to them only and all communication between nodes are encrypted.

The Telehash project is led by Jeremie Miller (creator of Jabber), who is now the CTO of Filament, a startup which is actively working on hardware based on the Telehash framework.

The idea of this project is to supplement the work they are already doing, to try and make it more accessible. I could not find a lot of example code to get started with on the Arduino and the RF module front, so I hope my experience in getting it working might help others out there.