Routinator 3000.

Introducing ‘Routinator 3000,’ an experimental RPKI relying party software written in Rust.

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. The Routinator 3000 will collect these statements into a local copy, validate their signatures, and output a list of associations between IP address prefixes and AS numbers in a number of useful formats.

Getting Started

There’s two things you need for the Routinator: rsync and Rust. You need the former because the RPKI repository currently uses rsync as its main means of distribution. You need the latter because that’s what the Routinator has been written in. Since this currently is a very early experimental 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.

If you don’t have rsync, please head to http://rsync.samba.org/.

Rust

The easiest and canonical way to install Rust on your machine and maintain that installation is a tool called rustup. While some distributions include Rust packages, we kind of rely on very recent stable releases at this point, so using rustup is preferred.

If you feel lucky, simply do:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

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

rustup update

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

In the directory you cloned this repository to, say

cargo build

This will build the whole thing (or fail, of course). If it succeeds, you can run

cargo run

to run the binary that has been built. At this point, it will rsync all repository instances into ./rpki-cache/repository and validate them.

When running, you might get rsync errors, such as from rpki.cnnic.cn. You can ignore these. Certainly, Routinator will.

To get a better performance, build and run in release mode like so:

cargo run --release

It will then take forever to build but is quick to run.

There is a number of command line options available. You can have cargo pass them to the executable after a double hyphen. For instance, if to find out about them, run

cargo run --release -- -h

When playing with these options, you might find -n useful. It will cause Routinator to skip the rsync-ing of the repository and significantly increase your turn-around.