:rocket: Routinator
Introducing ‘Routinator 3000,’ RPKI relying party software written in Rust.
Even though it is still early days for the Routinator, we have decided to provide a release in the spirit of open development. Please consider this when using the software. If you have any feedback, we would love to hear from you. Don’t hesitate to create an issue on Github or drop us a line at rpki@nlnetlabs.nl.
Quick Start
Assuming you have rsync and the C toolchain but not yet Rust, 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 -r -l 127.0.0.1:3323
If you have an older version of the Routinator, you can update via
cargo install -f routinator
RPKI
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.
Full Roadmap
- Fetch certificates and ROAs via rsync
- Perform cryptographic validation
- Export validated ROAs in CSV, JSON and RPSL format
- Add local white list exceptions and overrides (RFC 8416)
- Implement the RPKI-RTR protocol for pushing RPKI data to supported routers (RFC 6810)
- Exhaustive interoperability and compliance testing
- Integration with alerting and monitoring services so that route hijacks, misconfigurations, connectivity and application problems can be flagged.
- Implement the RRDP protocol for fetching (RFC 8182)
- Implement a basic web-based user interface and Command Line Interface
- Expose an API
- Add the ability to process Internet Routing Registry data
Getting Started
There’s two things you need for Routinator: rsync and Rust and a C toolc… There are three things you need for Routinator: rsync, Rust and a C toolchain. You need rsync because the RPKI repository currently uses rsync as its main means of distribution. You need Rust because that’s what the Routinator has been written in. Some of the cryptographic primitives used by the Routinator require a C toolchain, so you need that, too.
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.
rsync
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.
If you don’t have rsync, please head to http://rsync.samba.org/.
Rust
While some system distributions include Rust as system packages, Routinator relies on a relatively new version of Rust, currently 1.29 or newer. We therefore suggest to use the canonical Rust installation via a tool called rustup.
To install rustup and Rust, simply do:
|
or, 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
C Toolchain
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. 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.
Building and Running
The easiest way to get Routinator is to leave it to cargo by saying
cargo install routinator
If 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.git
If 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 that you can run routinator simply as:
If this is the first time you’ve
been using Routinator, it will create $HOME/.rpki-cache, put the
trust anchor locators of the five RIRs there, and then complain that
ARIN’s TAL is in fact not really there.
Follow the instructions provided and try again. You can also add
additional trust anchors by simple dropping their TAL file in RFC 7730
format into $HOME/.rpki-cache/tals.
Now Routinator will rsync the entire RPKI repository to your machine (which will take a while during the first run), validate it and produce a long list of AS numbers and prefixes.
When running, you might get rsync errors, such as from rpki.cnnic.cn which isn’t reachable. These servers will be ignored and tried again on the next run, so you ignore the errors.
There are a number of command line options available. You can find out about them by running
For somewhat more complete information on the options, you can also
consult the man page. It lives in doc/routinator.1 in the repository but
is also included in the executable and accessible via the --man option.
On Linux, you can simply run:
|
It is also available online on the NLnetLabs documentation site.
Feeding a Router with RPKI-RTR
Routinator supports RPKI-RTR as specified in RFC 8210. It will act as an
RTR server if you start it with the -r (or --repeat) or -d
(--daemon) option. In the latter case it will detach from the terminal
and log to syslog while in repeat mode it’ll stay with you.
You can specify the address(es) to listen on via the -l (or --listen)
option. If you don’t, it will listen on 127.0.0.1:3323 by default. We
are not using the IANA-assigned default port RTR, port 323, because that
would require root permissions to bind to the port. Also, note that the
default address is a localhost address for security reasons.
So, in order to run Routinator as an RTR server listening on port 3323 on both 192.0.2.13 and 2001:0DB8::13 in repeat mode, execute
By 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
Local Exceptions
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.