Introducing ‘Routinator 3000,’ RPKI relying party software written in Rust. If you have any feedback, we would love to hear from you. Don’t hesitate to create an issue on Github or post a message on our RPKI mailing list. You can lean more about Routinator and RPKI technology by reading our documentation on Read the Docs.
Assuming you have rsync and the C toolchain but not yet Rust 1.34 or newer, here’s how you get the Routinator to run as an RTR server listening on 127.0.0.1 port 3323:
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
source ~/.cargo/env
cargo install routinator
routinator init
# Follow instructions provided
routinator server --rtr 127.0.0.1:3323If you have an older version of the Routinator, you can update via
cargo install -f routinatorDue to the impracticality of complying with the ARIN TAL distribution terms in an unsupervised Docker environment, prior to launching the container it is necessary to first review and agree to the ARIN TAL terms available at https://www.arin.net/resources/rpki/tal.html. If you agree to the terms, you can let the Routinator Docker image install the TALs into a mounted volume that is later reused for the server:
# Create a Docker volume to persist TALs in
sudo docker volume create routinator-tals
# Review the ARIN terms.
# Run a disposable container to install TALs.
sudo docker run --rm -v routinator-tals:/home/routinator/.rpki-cache/tals \
nlnetlabs/routinator init -f --accept-arin-rpa
# Launch the final detached container named 'routinator' exposing RTR on
# port 3323 and HTTP on port 9556
sudo docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped --name routinator -p 3323:3323 \
-p 9556:9556 -v routinator-tals:/home/routinator/.rpki-cache/tals \
nlnetlabs/routinatorFor additional isolation, Routinator container is known to successfully run under gVisor.
The Resource Public Key Infrastructure provides cryptographically signed statements about the association of Internet routing resources. In particular, it allows the holder of an IP address prefix to publish which AS number will be the origin of BGP route announcements for it.
All of these statements are published in a distributed repository. Routinator will collect these statements into a local copy, validate their signatures, and construct a list of associations between IP address prefixes and AS numbers. It provides this information to routers supporting the RPKI-RTR protocol or can output it in a number of useful formats.
Routinator is designed to be lean and is capable of running on minimalist hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi. Running it on a system with 1GB of available RAM and 1GB of available disk space will give the global RPKI data set enough room to grow for the forseeable future. A powerful CPU is not required, as cryptographic validation currently takes less than two seconds on an average system.
There’s two things you need for Routinator: rsync and Rust and a C toolc… There are three things you need for Routinator: rsync, a C toolchain and Rust. You need rsync because the RPKI repository currently uses rsync as its main means of distribution. Some of the cryptographic primitives used by the Routinator require a C toolchain, so you need that, too. You need Rust because that’s what Routinator has been written in.
Since this currently is an early version, we decided not to distribute binary packages just yet. But don’t worry, getting Rust and building packages with it is easy.
Currently, Routinator requires the rsync executable to be in your path.
We are not quite sure which particular version you need at the very least,
but whatever is being shipped with current Linux and *BSD distributions
and macOS should be fine.
On Windows, Routinator requires the rsync version that comes with
Cygwin – make sure to select rsync during the
installation phase. And yes, Routinator totally works on Windows, too.
If you don’t have rsync, please head to http://rsync.samba.org/
Some of the libraries Routinator depends on require a C toolchain to be
present. Your system probably has some easy way to install the minimum
set of packages to build from C sources. For example, apt install build-essential will install everything you need on Debian/Ubuntu.
If you are unsure, try to run cc on a command line and if there’s a
complaint about missing input files, you are probably good to go.
On some older systems, the toolchain may not be up-to-date enough. We are collecting information as it comes up in a separate document. One such instance is CentOS 6.
The Rust compiler runs on, and compiles to, a great number of platforms. The official Rust Platform Support page provides an overview of the various platforms and support levels.
While some system distributions include Rust as system packages,
Routinator relies on a relatively new version of Rust, currently 1.34 or
newer. We therefore suggest to use the canonical Rust installation via a
tool called rustup.
To install rustup and Rust, simply do:
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | shor, alternatively, get the file, have a look and then run it manually. Follow the instructions to get rustup and cargo, the rust build tool, into your path.
You can update your Rust installation later by simply running
rustup updateTo get started you need Cargo's bin directory ($HOME/.cargo/bin) in your PATH environment variable. To configure your current shell, run
source $HOME/.cargo/envThe easiest way to get Routinator is to leave it to cargo by saying
cargo install routinatorIf you want to try the master branch from the repository instead of a release version, you can run
cargo install --git https://github.com/NLnetLabs/routinator.gitIf you want to update an installed version, you run the same command but
add the -f flag (aka force) to approve overwriting the installed
version.
The command will build Routinator and install it in the same directory
that cargo itself lives in (likely $HOME/.cargo/bin).
Which means Routinator will be in your path, too.
All functions of Routinator are accessible on the command line via sub-commands.
The first thing you need to do before running Routinator is prepare its working environment via the
routinator initcommand. This will prepare
both the directory for the local RPKI cache as well as the TAL directory.
By default both directories will be located under $HOME/.rpki-cache, but
you can change their locations via command line options.
TALs provide hints for the trust anchor certificates to be used both to
discover and validate all RPKI content. The five TALs that are necessary
for RPKI are bundled with Routinator and installed by the routinator init command.
However, the one from the North American RIR ARIN requires you to agree to
their Relying Party Agreement before you can use it. Running the routinator init
command will provide you with instructions where to find the agreement and
how to express your acceptance of its terms.
Once you have successfully prepared the working environment, your can run Routinator in one of two possible modes: printing the list of valid route origins, also known as Validated ROA Payload or VRP, or providing the service for routers and other clients to access this list via HTTP or a dedicated protocol known as RPKI-to-Router protocol or RTR.
To have Routinator print the list, you say
routinator vrpsWhen you first run this command, Routinator will rsync the entire RPKI repository to your machine which will take a while. Later, rsync only needs to check for changes so subsequent runs will be quicker. Once it has gathered all data, it will validate it and produce a long list of AS numbers and prefixes.
Information about additional command line arguments is available via the
-h option or you can look at the more detailed man page via the man
sub-command:
routinator manIt is also available online on the NLnetLabs documentation site.
Routinator supports RPKI-RTR as specified in RFC 8210 as well as the older
version from RFC 6810. It will act as an RTR server if you start it with
the routinator server command.
You can specify the address(es) to listen on via the --rtr
option. If you don’t, it will still start but not listen on anything. This
may seem a bit odd, but this way, you can keep your local repository copy
up-to-date for faster use of the routinator vrps command.
So, in order to run Routinator as an RTR server listening on port 3323 on both 192.0.2.13 and 2001:0DB8::13, run
routinator server --rtr 192.0.2.13:3323 --rtr [2001:0DB8::13]:3323By default, the repository will be updated and re-validated every hour as
per the recommendation in the RFC. You can change this via the
--refresh option and specify the interval between re-validations in
seconds. That is, if you rather have Routinator validate every fifteen
minutes, the above command becomes
routinator server --rtr 192.0.2.13:3323 --rtr [2001:0DB8::13]:3323 --refresh=900RFC6810 defines a number of secure transports for RPKI-RTR that can be used for communication between a router and a RPKI relying party.
Documentation on configuring secure transports with Routinator can be found here.
Routinator can take its configuration from a file, too. You can specify
such a configuration file via the -c option. If you don’t, Routinator
will check if there is a file $HOME/.routinator.conf and if it exists,
use it. If it doesn’t exist and there is no -c option, default values
are used.
The configuration file is a TOML file. Its entries are named similarly to the command line options. Details about the available entries and there meaning can be found in the manual page. In addition, a complete sample configuration file showing all the default values can be found in the repository at etc/routinator.conf.
If you would like to add exceptions to the validated RPKI data in the
form of local filters and additions, you can specify this in a file
using JSON notation according to the SLURM standard. You can find
two example files in the repository at /test/slurm. Use the -x option
to refer to your file with local exceptions.
Routinator will re-read that file on every validation run, so you can simply update the file whenever your exceptions change.
Monitoring a Routinator instance is possible by enabling the integrated
Prometheus exporter using the --http
configuration option or command line parameter.
Port 9556 is allocated for this use. A Routinator instance with monitoring on this port can be launched so:
routinator server --rtr 192.0.2.13:3323 --rtr [2001:0DB8::13]:3323 --http 192.0.2.13:9556