Routinator
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.
Quick Start with Cargo
Assuming you have a newly installed Debian or Ubuntu machine, you will need to install rsync, the C toolchain and Rust. You can then install Routinator and start it up as an RTR server listening on 127.0.0.1 port 3323 and HTTP on port 8323:
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# Follow instructions provided
If you have an older version of Rust and Routinator, you can update using
Routinator 0.7.1 and newer are shipped with updated Trust Anchor Locators (TALs). Once you have upgraded from an older version of Routinator, make sure to install the new TALs using
routinator init --force
Quick Start with Debian and Ubuntu Packages
Disclaimer
These packages are provided on a best effort basis as a convenience for our community until such time as equivalent official operating system repository provided packages become available.
Assuming you have a machine running a recent Debian or Ubuntu distribution, you
can install Routinator from our software package
repository. To use this repository, add the line
below that corresponds to your operating system to your /etc/apt/sources.list
or /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
Then run the following commands.
&&
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You can then install, initialise, enable and start Routinator by running these
commands. Note that routinator-init is slightly different than the command
used with Cargo.
# Follow instructions provided
By default, Routinator will start the RTR server on port 3323 and the HTTP
server on port 8323. These, and other values can be changed in the
configuration file located in /etc/routinator/routinator.conf. You can check
the status of Routinator with sudo systemctl status routinator and view the
logs with sudo journalctl --unit=routinator.
Quick Start with Docker
Due 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
# Review the ARIN terms.
# Run a disposable container to install TALs.
# Launch the final detached container named 'routinator' exposing RTR on
# port 3323 and HTTP on port 9556
For additional isolation, Routinator container is known to successfully run under gVisor.
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.
System Requirements
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 foreseeable future. A powerful CPU is not required, as cryptographic validation currently takes less than two seconds on an average system.
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, a C toolchain and Rust. You need rsync because some RPKI repositories currently use this as its 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.
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.
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/
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. 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.
Rust
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 1.42 or
newer. We therefore suggest to use the canonical Rust installation via a
tool called rustup.
To install rustup and Rust, simply do:
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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
To get started you need Cargo's bin directory ($HOME/.cargo/bin) in your PATH environment variable. To configure your current shell, run
Building
The easiest way to get Routinator is to leave it to cargo by saying
If you want to try the main branch from the repository instead of a release version, you can run
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 Routinator will be in your path, too.
Using native TLS instead of Rustls
Routinator by default uses Rustls which in most cases is fine. However, if needed you can instead use your system native TLS implementation with Routinator like so:
Cargo:
Build Routinator with the native-tls feature enabled:
Docker:
Specify a native-tls image tag when running the container:
Running
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
command. 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
When you first run this command, Routinator will download the entire RPKI repository to your machine which will take a while. Later, Routinator 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:
It is also available online in the documentation.
Feeding a Router with RPKI-RTR
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
By default, the repository will be updated and re-validated every ten minutes.
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
Secure Transports for RPKI-RTR
RFC6810 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.
Configuration Files
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.
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.
Monitoring
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:
A sample Grafana dashboard is available to get started.