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ROUTINATOR(1) Routinator ROUTINATOR(1)

routinator - RPKI relying party software

routinator [options] vrps [vrps-options] [-o output-file] [-f format]

routinator [options] validate [validate-options] [-a asn] [-p prefix]

routinator [options] server [server-options]

routinator [options] update [update-options]

routinator [archive-stats] archive-stats path

routinator man [-o file]

routinator -h

routinator -V

Routinator collects and processes Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) data. It validates the Route Origin Attestations contained in the data and makes them available to your BGP routing workflow.

It can run in one-shot mode outputting a list of validated ROA payloads in various formats, as a server for the RPKI-to-Router (RTR) protocol that many routers implement to access the data, or via HTTP.

These modes and additional operations can be chosen via commands. For the available commands, see COMMANDS below.

The available options are:

Provides the path to a file containing basic configuration. If this option is not given, Routinator will try to use $HOME/.routinator.conf if that exists. If that doesn't exist, either, default values for the options as described here are used.

See CONFIGURATION FILE below for more information on the format and contents of the configuration file.


Specifies the directory to keep the local repository in. This is the place where Routinator stores the RPKI data it has collected and thus is a copy of all the data referenced via the trust anchors.

If omitted, defaults to $HOME/.rpki-cache/repository.


If present, Routinator will not use the bundled trust anchor locators (TALs) of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

Trust anchor locators are the starting points for collecting and validating RPKI data. Each of the five RIRs provides a TAL that adds resources from their area. For normal production installations, these are the only TALs that should be used.

Using this option as well as the --tal and --extra-tals-dir options you can change which TALs Routinator should use.


Use the bundled TAL with the given name in addition to any other TAL.

Each RIR TAL is available through this option as well as TALs for a few select test environments. If you use this option with the name list, Routinator will print a list of all available bundled TALS and exit.

The option can be given more than once.


Specifies a directory containing additional trust anchor locators (TALs) to use. Routinator will use all files in this directory with an extension of .tal as TALs. These files need to be in the format described by RFC 8630.

Note that Routinator will use all TALs provided. That means that if a TAL in this directory is one of the bundled TALs, then these resources will be validated twice.


Provides the path to a local exceptions file. The option can be used multiple times to specify more than one file to use. Each file is a JSON file as described in RFC 8416. It lists both route origins that should be filtered out of the output as well as origins that should be added.

If this option is present, the repository will be validated in strict mode following the requirements laid out by the standard documents very closely. With the current RPKI repository, using this option will lead to a rather large amount of invalid route origins and should therefore not be used in practice.

See RELAXED DECODING below for more information.


This option defines how deal with stale objects. In RPKI, manifests and CRLs can be stale if the time given in their next-update field is in the past, indicating that an update to the object was scheduled but didn't happen. This can be because of an operational issue at the issuer or an attacker trying to replay old objects.

There are three possible policies that define how Routinator should treat stale objects.

A policy of reject instructs Routinator to consider all stale objects invalid. This will result in all material published by the CA issuing this manifest and CRL to be invalid including all material of any child CA.

The warn policy will allow Routinator to consider any stale object to be valid. It will, however, print a warning in the log allowing an operator to follow up on the issue.

Finally, the accept policy will cause Routinator to quietly accept any stale object as valid.

In Routinator 0.8.0 and newer, reject is the default policy if the option is not provided. In version 0.7.0 the default for this option was warn. In all previous versions warn was hard-wired.


This option defines how to deal with "unsafe VRPs." If the address prefix of a VRP overlaps with any resources assigned to a CA that has been rejected because if failed to validate completely, the VRP is said to be unsafe since using it may lead to legitimate routes being flagged as RPKI invalid.

There are three options how to deal with unsafe VRPs:

A policy of reject will filter out these VRPs. Warnings will be logged to indicate which VRPs have been filtered

The warn policy will log warnings for unsafe VRPs but will add them to the valid VRPs.

Finally, the accept policy will quietly add unsafe VRPs to the valid VRPs. This is the default policy.

For more information on the process of validation implemented in Routinator, see the section VALIDATION below.


Defines how to deal with unknown types of RPKI objects. Currently, only certificates (.cer), CRLs (.crl), manifests (.mft), ROAs (.roa), and Ghostbuster Records (.gbr) are allowed to appear in the RPKI repository.

There are, once more, three policies for dealing with an object of any other type:

The reject policy will reject the object as well as the entire CA. Consequently, an unknown object appearing in a CA will mark all other objects issued by the CA as invalid as well.

The policy of warn will log a warning, ignore the object, and accept all known objects issued by the CA.

The similar policy of accept will quietly ignore the object and accept all known objects issued by the CA.

The default policy if the option is missing is warn.

Note that even if unknown objects are accepted, they must appear in the manifest and the hash over their content must match the one given in the manifest. If the hash does not match, the CA and all its objects are still rejected.


If present, defines the maximum length of IPv4 prefixes or IPv6 prefixes, respectively, that will be included in the VRP data set. All VRPs for prefixes with a longer prefix length will be ignored. Note that only the prefix length itself, not the max length is considered.

If either option is missing, VRPs for all prefixes of that particular address family are included.


As a precaution, Routinator will reject rsync and HTTPS URIs from RPKI data with dubious host names. In particular, it will reject the name localhost, host names that consist of IP addresses, and a host name that contains an explicit port.

This option allows to disable this filtering.


Delete and re-initialize the local data storage before starting. This option should be used when Routinator fails after reporting corrupt data storage.

If this option is present, rsync is disabled and only RRDP will be used.

Provides the command to run for rsync. This is only the command itself. If you need to provide options to rsync, use the rsync-args configuration file setting instead.

If this option is not given, Routinator will simply run rsync and hope that it is in the path.


Sets the number of seconds an rsync command is allowed to run before it is terminated early. This protects against hanging rsync commands that prevent Routinator from continuing. The default is 300 seconds which should be long enough except for very slow networks. Set the option to 0 to disable the timeout.

If this option is present, RRDP is disabled and only rsync will be used.

Defines the circumstance when access via rsync should be tried for a CA that announces it can be updated via RRDP. In general, access via RRDP is less resource intensive and more secure than rsync and will therefore be preferred. This option specifies what to do when access to an RRDP repository fails.

The policy never means that rsync is never tried for a CA that announces RRDP.

The policy stale means that rsync is tried if an update via RRDP fails and there is no current local copy of the RRDP repository. A local copy is considered current if it was last updated within a time span chosen on a per-repository basis between the --refresh time and --rrdp-fallback-time.

The policy new means that rsync is tried if an update via RRDP fails and there is no local copy of the RRDP repository at all. In other words, an update via RRDP has never succeeded for the repository. Choosing this policy allows a repository operator some leeway when first enabling RRDP support.

The default policy if this option is not given is stale.


Sets the maximum time in seconds since a last successful update of an RRDP repository before Routinator falls back to using rsync. The default is 3600 seconds. If the given value is smaller than twice the refresh time, it is silently increased to that value.

The actual time is chosen at random between the refresh time and this value in order to spread out load on the rsync server.


If the number of deltas necessary to update an RRDP repository is larger than the value provided by this option, the snapshot is used instead. If the option is missing, the default of 100 is used.

If the number of deltas included in the notification file of an RRDP repository is larger than the value provided, the delta list is considered empty and the snapshot is used instead. If the option is missing, the default of 500 is used.

Sets the timeout in seconds for any RRDP-related network operation, i.e., connects, reads, and writes. If this option is omitted, the default timeout of 300 seconds is used. Set the option to 0 to disable the timeout.

Sets the timeout in seconds for RRDP connect requests. If omitted, the general timeout will be used.

Sets the value of the TCP keepalive duration in seconds for RRDP connections. The default if this option is omitted is 60 seconds. Set the option to 0 to disable the use of TCP keepalives.

If present, sets the local address that the RRDP client should bind to when doing outgoing requests.

This option provides a path to a file that contains a certificate in PEM encoding that should be used as a trusted certificate for HTTPS server authentication. The option can be given more than once.

Providing this option does not disable the set of regular HTTPS authentication trust certificates.


This option provides the URI of a proxy to use for all HTTP connections made by the RRDP client. It can be either an HTTP or a SOCKS URI. The option can be given multiple times in which case proxies are tried in the given order.

If this option is enabled, the bodies of all HTTPS responses received from RRDP servers will be stored under path. The sub-path will be constructed using the components of the requested URI. For the responses to the notification files, the timestamp is appended to the path to make it possible to distinguish the series of requests made over time.

Limits the size of individual objects received via either rsync or RRDP to the given number of bytes. The default value if this option is not present is 20,000,000 (i.e., 20 MBytes). Use a value of 0 to disable the limit.

The maximum number of CAs a given CA may be away from a trust anchor certificate before it is rejected. The default value is 32.

If this option is present, BGPsec router keys will be processed during validation and included in the produced data set.

If this option is present, ASPA assertions will be processed during validation and included in the produced data set.

If this option is present, unused files and directories will not be deleted from the repository directory after each validation run.

Sets the number of threads to distribute work to for validation. Note that the current processing model validates trust anchors all in one go, so you are likely to see less than that number of threads used throughout the validation run.

Print more information. If given twice, even more information is printed.

More specifically, a single -v increases the log level from the default of warn to info, specifying it more than once increases it to debug.

See LOGGING below for more information on what information is logged at the different levels.


Print less information. Given twice, print nothing at all.

A single -q will drop the log level to error. Repeating -q more than once turns logging off completely.


Redirect logging output to syslog.

This option is implied if a command is used that causes Routinator to run in daemon mode.


--syslog-facility=facility
If logging to syslog is used, this option can be used to specify the syslog facility to use. The default is daemon.

Redirect logging output to the given file.

Print some help information.

Print version information.

Routinator provides a number of operations around the local RPKI repository. These can be requested by providing different commands on the command line.

This command requests that Routinator update the local repository and then validate the Route Origin Attestations in the repository and output the valid route origins, which are also known as Validated ROA Payloads or VRPs, as a list.
Specifies the output file to write the list to. If this option is missing or file is - the list is printed to standard output.

The output format to use. Routinator currently supports the following formats:
The list is formatted as lines of comma-separated values of the autonomous system number, the prefix in slash notation, the maximum prefix length, and an abbreviation for the trust anchor the entry is derived from. The latter is the name of the TAL file without the extension .tal. This can be overwritten with the tal-labels config file option.

This is the default format used if the -f option is missing.

The same as csv except that all fields are embedded in double quotes and the autonomous system number is given without the prefix AS. This format is pretty much identical to the CSV produced by the RIPE NCC Validator.
An extended version of csv each line contains these comma-separated values: the rsync URI of the ROA the line is taken from (or "N/A" if it isn't from a ROA), the autonomous system number, the prefix in slash notation, the maximum prefix length, the not-before date and not-after date of the validity of the ROA.

This format was used in the RIPE NCC RPKI Validator version 1. That version produces one file per trust anchor. This is not currently supported by Routinator -- all entries will be in one single output file.

The list is placed into a JSON object with up to four members: roas contains the validated route origin authorizations, routerKeys contains the validated BGPsec router keys, aspas contains the validated ASPA payload, and metadata contains some information about the validation run itself. Of the first three, only those members are present that have not been disabled or excluded.

The roas member contains an array of objects with four elements each: The autonomous system number of the network authorized to originate a prefix in asn, the prefix in slash notation in prefix, the maximum prefix length of the announced route in maxLength, and the trust anchor from which the authorization was derived in ta.

The routerKeys member contains an array of objects with four elements each: The autonomous system using the router key is given in asn, the key identifier as a string of hexadecimal digits in SKI, the actual public key as a Base 64 encoded string in routerPublicKey, and the trust anchor from which the authorization was derived in ta.

The aspa member contains an array of objects with four members each: The customer member contains the customer ASN, afi the address family as either "ipv4" or "ipv6", providers contains the provider ASN set as an array, and the trust anchor from which the authorization was derived in ta.

The output object also includes a member named metadata which provides additional information. Currently, this is a member generated which provides the time the list was generated as a Unix timestamp, and a member generatedTime which provides the same time but in the standard ISO date format.

If only route origins are included, this format is identical to that produced by the RIPE NCC RPKI Validator except for different naming of the trust anchor. Routinator uses the name of the TAL file without the extension .tal whereas the RIPE NCC Validator has a dedicated name for each.

The list is placed into a JSON object with up to four members: roas contains the validated route origin authorizations, routerKeys contains the validated BGPsec router keys, aspas contains the validated ASPA payload, and metadata contains some information about the validation run itself. Of the first three, only those members are present that have not been disabled or excluded.

The roas member contains an array of objects with four elements each: The autonomous system number of the network authorized to originate a prefix in asn, the prefix in slash notation in prefix, the maximum prefix length of the announced route in maxLength, and extended information about the source of the authorization in source.

The routerKeys member contains an array of objects with four elements each: The autonomous system using the router key is given in asn, the key identifier as a string of hexadecimal digits in SKI, the actual public key as a Base 64 encoded string in routerPublicKey, and extended information about the source of the key is contained in source.

The aspa member contains an array of objects with four members each: The customer member contains the customer ASN, afi the address family as either "ipv4" or "ipv6", providers contains the provider ASN set as an array, and information about the source of the data can be found in source.

This source information the same for route origins and router keys. It consists of an array. Each item in that array is an object providing details of a source. The object will have a type of roa if it was derived from a valid ROA object, cer if it was derived from a published router certificate, or exception if it was an assertion in a local exception file.

For RPKI objects, tal provides the name of the trust anchor locator the object was published under, uri provides the rsync URI of the ROA or router certificate, validity provides the validity of the ROA itself, chainValidity the validity considering the validity of the certificates along the validation chain, and stale the time when any of the publication points along the validation chain becomes stale.

For assertions from local exceptions, path will provide the path of the local exceptions file and, optionally, comment will provide the comment if given for the assertion.

The output object also includes a member named metadata which provides additional information. Currently, this is a member generated which provides the time the list was generated as a Unix timestamp, and a member generatedTime which provides the same time but in the standard ISO date format.

Please note that because of this additional information, output in jsonext format will be quite large.

The list is formatted as locally added assertions of a local exceptions file defined by RFC 8416 (also known as SLURM). The produced file will have empty validation output filters.
Choosing this format causes Routinator to produce a roa-set configuration item for the OpenBGPD configuration.
Choosing this format causes Routinator to produce a roa table configuration item for the BIRD1 configuration.
Choosing this format causes Routinator to produce a roa table configuration item for the BIRD2 configuration.
This format produces a list of RPSL objects with the authorization in the fields route, origin, and source. In addition, the fields descr, mnt-by, created, and last-modified, are present with more or less meaningful values.
This format produces a summary of the content of the RPKI repository. For each trust anchor, it will print the number of verified ROAs and VRPs. Note that this format does not take filters into account. It will always provide numbers for the complete repository.
This format produces no output whatsoever.


The repository will not be updated before producing the list.

If any of the rsync commands needed to update the repository failed, complete the operation but provide exit status 2. If this option is not given, the operation will complete with exit status 0 in this case.

Only output VRPs for the given ASN. The option can be given multiple times, in which case VRPs for all provided ASNs are provided. ASNs can be given with or without the prefix AS.

Only output VRPs with an address prefix that covers the given prefix, i.e., whose prefix is equal to or less specific than the given prefix. This will include VRPs regardless of their ASN and max length. In other words, the output will include all VRPs that need to be considered when deciding whether an announcement for the prefix is RPKI valid or invalid.

The option can be given multiple times, in which case VRPs for all prefixes are provided. It can also be combined with one or more ASN selections. Then all matching VRPs are included. That is, selectors combine as "or" not "and".


Include VRPs with prefixes that are more specifics of those given by the -p option. Without this option, only VRPs with prefixes equal or less specific are included.

Note that VRPs with more specific prefixes have no influence on whether a route is RPKI valid or invalid and therefore these VRPs are of an informational nature only.


These three options can be used to exclude the various payload types from being included in the output.


This command can be used to perform RPKI route origin validation for one or more route announcements. Routinator will determine whether the provided announcements are RPKI valid, invalid, or not found.

A single route announcement can be given directly on the command line:

The AS Number of the autonomous system that originated the route announcement. ASNs can be given with or without the prefix AS.

The address prefix the route announcement is for.

A detailed analysis on the reasoning behind the validation is printed in JSON format including lists of the VRPs that caused the particular result. If this option is omitted, Routinator will only print the determined state.

Alternatively, a list of route announcements can be read from a file or standard input.

If present, input is read from the given file. If the file is given is a single dash, input is read from standard output.

If this option is provided, the input is assumed to be JSON format. It should consist of a single object with one member routes which contains an array of objects. Each object describes one route announcement through its prefix and asn members which contain a prefix and originating AS Number as strings, respectively.

If the option is not provided, the input is assumed to consist of simple plain text with one route announcement per line, provided as a prefix followed by an ASCII-art arrow => surrounded by white space and followed by the AS Number of originating autonomous system.


The following additional options are available independently of the input method.

Output is written to the provided file. If the option is omitted or file is given as a single dash, output is written to standard output.

The repository will not be updated before performing validation.

If any of the rsync commands needed to update the repository failed, complete the operation but provide exit status 2. If this option is not given, the operation will complete with exit status 0 in this case.


This command causes Routinator to act as a server for the RPKI-to-Router (RTR) and HTTP protocols. In this mode, Routinator will read all the Trust Anchor Locators and will stay attached to the terminal unless the -d option is given.

The server will periodically update the local repository, every ten minutes by default, notify any clients of changes, and let them fetch validated data. It will not, however, reread the trust anchor locators. Thus, if you update them, you will have to restart Routinator.

You can provide a number of addresses and ports to listen on for RTR and HTTP through command line options or their configuration file equivalent. Currently, Routinator will only start listening on these ports after an initial validation run has finished.

It will not listen on any sockets unless explicitly specified. It will still run and periodically update the repository. This might be useful for use with vrps mode with the -n option.

If present, Routinator will detach from the terminal after a successful start.

Specifies a local address and port to listen on for incoming RTR connections.

Routinator supports both protocol version 0 defined in RFC 6810 and version 1 defined in RFC 8210. However, it does not support router keys introduced in version 1. IPv6 addresses must be enclosed in square brackets. You can provide the option multiple times to let Routinator listen on multiple address-port pairs.


Specifies a local address and port to listen for incoming TLS-encrypted RTR connections.

The private key and server certificate given via the --rtr-tls-key and --rtr-tls-cert or their equivalent config file options will be used for connections.

The option can be given multiple times, but the same key and certificate will be used for all connections.


Specifies the address and port to listen on for incoming HTTP connections. See HTTP SERVICE below for more information on the HTTP service provided by Routinator.

Specifies a local address and port to listen of for incoming TLS-encrypted HTTP connections.

The private key and server certificate given via the --http-tls-key and --http-tls-cert or their equivalent config file options will be used for connections.

The option can be given multiple times, but the same key and certificate will be used for all connections.


The RTR listening socket will be acquired from systemd via socket activation. Use this option together with systemd's socket units to allow a Routinator running as a regular user to bind to the default RTR port 323.

Currently, all TCP listener sockets handed over by systemd will be used for the RTR protocol.


The number of seconds to wait before sending a TCP keepalive on an established RTR connection. By default, TCP keepalive is enabled on all RTR connections with an idle time of 60 seconds. Set this option to 0 to disable keepalives.

On some systems, notably OpenBSD, this option only enables TCP keepalives if set to any value other than 0. You will have to use the system's own mechanisms to change the idle times.


If provided, the server metrics will include separate metrics for every RTR client. Clients are identified by their RTR source IP address. This is disabled by default to avoid accidentally leaking information about the local network topology.

Specifies the path to a file containing the private key to be used for RTR-over-TLS connections. The file has to contain exactly one private key encoded in PEM format.

Specifies the path to a file containing the server certificates to be used for RTR-over-TLS connections. The file has to contain one or more certificates encoded in PEM format.

Specifies the path to a file containing the private key to be used for HTTP-over-TLS connections. The file has to contain exactly one private key encoded in PEM format.

Specifies the path to a file containing the server certificates to be used for HTTP-over-TLS connections. The file has to contain one or more certificates encoded in PEM format.

The amount of seconds the server should wait after having finished updating and validating the local repository before starting to update again. The next update will be earlier if objects in the repository expire earlier. The default value is 600 seconds.

The amount of seconds to suggest to an RTR client to wait before trying to request data again if that failed. The default value is 600 seconds, as recommended in RFC 8210.

The amount of seconds to an RTR client can keep using data if it cannot refresh it. After that time, the client should discard the data. Note that this value was introduced in version 1 of the RTR protocol and is thus not relevant for clients that only implement version 0. The default value, as recommended in RFC 8210, is 7200 seconds.

In RTR, a client can request to only receive the changes that happened since the last version of the data it had seen. This option sets how many change sets the server will at most keep. If a client requests changes from an older version, it will get the current full set.

Note that routers typically stay connected with their RTR server and therefore really only ever need one single change set. Additionally, if RTR server or router are restarted, they will have a new session with new change sets and need to exchange a full data set, too. Thus, increasing the value probably only ever increases memory consumption.

The default value is 10.


States a file which will be used in daemon mode to store the processes PID. While the process is running, it will keep the file locked.

The working directory for the daemon process. In daemon mode, Routinator will change to this directory while detaching from the terminal.

The root directory for the daemon process. If this option is provided, the daemon process will change its root directory to the given directory. This will only work if all other paths provided via the configuration or command line options are under this directory.

The name of the user to change to for server mode. It this option is provided, Routinator will run as that user after the listening sockets for HTTP and RTR have been created. This may cause problems, if the user is not allowed to write to the directory given as repository directory or local exception files.

The name of the group to change to for server mode. It this option is provided, Routinator will run as that group after the listening sockets for HTTP and RTR have been created.


Updates the local repository by resyncing all known publication points. The command will also validate the updated repository to discover any new publication points that appear in the repository and fetch their data.

As such, the command really is a shortcut for running routinator vrps -f none.

If any of the rsync commands needed to update the repository failed, Routinator completes the operation and exits with status code 2. If this option is not given, the operation will complete with exit status 0 in this case.


Writes the content of all stored data to the file system. This is primarily intended for debugging but can be used to get access to the view of the RPKI data that Routinator currently sees.
Write the output to the given directory. If the option is omitted, the current directory is used.

Three directories will be created in the output directory:

The rrdp directory will contain all the files collected via RRDP from the various repositories. Each repository is stored in its own directory. The mapping between rpkiNotify URI and path is provided in the repositories.json file. For each repository, the files are stored in a directory structure based on the components of the file as rsync URI.

The rsync directory contains all the files collected via rsync. The files are stored in a directory structure based on the components of the file's rsync URI.

The store directory contains all the files used for validation. Files collected via RRDP or rsync are copied to the store if they are correctly referenced by a valid manifest. This part contains one directory for each RRDP repository similarly structured to the rrdp directory and one additional directory rsync that contains files collected via rsync.


Prints some statistics about the content of an RRDP archive file to standard out. This is likely only useful for development.

Displays the manual page, i.e., this page.
If this option is provided, the manual page will be written to the given file instead of displaying it. Use - to output the manual page to standard output.


Instead of providing all options on the command line, they can also be provided through a configuration file. Such a file can be selected through the -c option. If no configuration file is specified this way but a file named $HOME/.routinator.conf is present, this file is used.

The configuration file is a file in TOML format. In short, it consists of a sequence of key-value pairs, each on its own line. Strings are to be enclosed in double quotes. Lists can be given by enclosing a comma-separated list of values in square brackets.

The configuration file can contain the following entries. All path values are interpreted relative to the directory the configuration file is located in. All values can be overridden via the command line options.

A string containing the path to the directory to store the local repository in. This entry is mandatory.
A boolean specifying whether the five RIR Trust Anchor Locators (TALs) should not be added to the set of evaluated TALs. If missing, the RIR TALs will be used.
A list of strings, each containing the name of a bundled TAL to be added to the set of TALs to be evaluated.
A string containing the path to a directory that contains additional TALs.
A list of strings, each containing the path to a file with local exceptions. If missing, no local exception files are used.
A boolean specifying whether strict validation should be employed. If missing, strict validation will not be used.
A string specifying the policy for dealing with stale objects.
Consider all stale objects invalid rendering all material published by the CA issuing the stale object to be invalid including all material of any child CA. This is the default policy if the value is missing.
Consider stale objects to be valid but print a warning to the log.
Quietly consider stale objects valid.

A string specifying the policy for dealing with unsafe VRPs.
Filter unsafe VRPs and add warning messages to the log.
Warn about unsafe VRPs in the log but add them to the final set of VRPs.
Quietly add unsafe VRPs to the final set of VRPs. This is the default policy if the value is missing.

A string specifying the policy for dealing with unknown RPKI object types.
Reject the object and its issuing CA.
Warn about the object but ignore it and accept the issuing CA. This is the default policy if the value is missing.
Quietly ignore the object and accept the issuing CA.

An integer value which, if present, limits the length of IPv4 prefixes for which VPRs are included in the data set to the given value.
An integer value which, if present, limits the length of IPv6 prefixes for which VPRs are included in the data set to the given value.
A boolean value that, if present and true, disables Routinator's filtering of dubious host names in rsync and HTTPS URIs from RPKI data.
A boolean value that, if present and true, turns off the use of rsync.
A string specifying the command to use for running rsync. The default is simply rsync.
A list of strings containing additional arguments to be passed to the rsync command. Each string is an argument of its own.

The options -rtO --delete are always passed to the command. The options listed in the option are added to it.

If the option is not provided, Routinator will add -z and --no-motd, as well as --contimeout=10 if it is supported by the rsync command, and --max-size if the max-object-size option has not been set to 0.

An integer value specifying the number seconds an rsync command is allowed to run before it is being terminated. The default if the value is missing is 300 seconds. Set the value to 0 to turn the timeout off.
A boolean value that, if present and true, turns off the use of RRDP.
A string value specifying the circumstances under which an update via rsync is tried if an update via RRDP fails. See --rrdp-fallback for details on the available policies.
An integer value specifying the maximum number of seconds since a last successful update of an RRDP repository before Routinator falls back to using rsync. The default in case the value is missing is 3600 seconds. If the value provided is smaller than twice the refresh time, it is silently increased to that value.
An integer value that specifies the maximum number of deltas necessary to update an RRDP repository before using the snapshot instead. If the value is missing, the default of 100 is used.
An integer value that specifies the maximum number of deltas listed the notification file of an RRDP repository before the list is considered empty and the snapshot is used instead. If the value is missing, the default of 500 is used.
An integer value that provides a timeout in seconds for all individual RRDP-related network operations, i.e., connects, reads, and writes. If the value is missing, a default timeout of 300 seconds will be used. Set the value to 0 to turn the timeout off.
An integer value that, if present, sets a separate timeout in seconds for RRDP connect requests only.
An integer value that provides the duration in seconds for the TCP keepalive option on RRDP connections. If the value is missing, a duration of 60 seconds is used. Set the value to 0 to disable the use of TCP keepalive for RRDP connections.
A string value that provides the local address to be used by RRDP connections.
A list of strings each providing a path to a file containing a trust anchor certificate for HTTPS authentication of RRDP connections. In addition to the certificates provided via this option, the system's own trust store is used.
A list of string each providing the URI for a proxy for outgoing RRDP connections. The proxies are tried in order for each request. HTTP and SOCKS5 proxies are supported.
A string containing a path to a directory into which the bodies of all HTTPS responses received from RRDP servers will be stored. The sub-path will be constructed using the components of the requested URI. For the responses to the notification files, the timestamp is appended to the path to make it possible to distinguish the series of requests made over time.
An integer value that provides a limit for the size of individual objects received via either rsync or RRDP to the given number of bytes. The default value if this option is not present is 20,000,000 (i.e., 20 MBytes). A value of 0 disables the limit.
An integer value that specifies the maximum number of CAs a given CA may be away from a trust anchor certificate before it is rejected. If the option is missing, a default of 32 will be used.
A boolean value specifying whether BGPsec router keys should be included in the published dataset. If false or missing, no router keys will be included.
A boolean value specifying whether ASPA assertions should be included in the published dataset. If false or missing, no ASPA assertions will be included.
A boolean value which, if true, specifies that unused files and directories should not be deleted from the repository directory after each validation run. If left out, its value will be false and unused files will be deleted.
An integer value specifying the number of threads to be used during validation of the repository. If this value is missing, the number of CPUs in the system is used.
log-level
A string value specifying the maximum log level for which log messages should be emitted. The default is warn.

See LOGGING below for more information on what information is logged at the different levels.

A string specifying where to send log messages to. This can be one of the following values:
Log messages will be sent to standard error if Routinator stays attached to the terminal or to syslog if it runs in daemon mode.
Log messages will be sent to standard error.
Log messages will be sent to syslog.
Log messages will be sent to the file specified through the log-file configuration file entry.

The default if this value is missing is, unsurprisingly, default.

log-file
A string value containing the path to a file to which log messages will be appended if the log configuration value is set to file. In this case, the value is mandatory.
syslog-facility
A string value specifying the syslog facility to use for logging to syslog. The default value if this entry is missing is daemon.
An array of string values each providing an address and port on which the RTR server should listen in TCP mode. Address and port should be separated by a colon. IPv6 address should be enclosed in square brackets.
An array of string values each providing an address and port on which the RTR server should listen in TLS mode. Address and port should be separated by a colon. IPv6 address should be enclosed in square brackets.
An array of string values each providing an address and port on which the HTTP server should listene. Address and port should be separated by a colon. IPv6 address should be enclosed in square brackets.
An array of string values each providing an address and port on which the HTTP server should listen in TLS mode. Address and port should be separated by a colon. IPv6 address should be enclosed in square brackets.
The RTR TCP listening socket will be acquired from systemd via socket activation. Use this option together with systemd's socket units to allow Routinator running as a regular user to bind to the default RTR port 323.
An integer value specifying the number of seconds to wait before sending a TCP keepalive on an established RTR connection. If this option is missing, TCP keepalive will be enabled on all RTR connections with an idle time of 60 seconds. If this option is present and set to zero, TCP keepalives are disabled.

On some systems, notably OpenBSD, this option only enables TCP keepalives if set to any value other than 0. You will have to use the system's own mechanisms to change the idle times.

A boolean value specifying whether server metrics should include separate metrics for every RTR client. If the value is missing, no RTR client metrics will be provided.
A string value providing the path to a file containing the private key to be used by the RTR server in TLS mode. The file must contain one private key in PEM format.
A string value providing the path to a file containing the server certificates to be used by the RTR server in TLS mode. The file must contain one or more certificates in PEM format.
A string value providing the path to a file containing the private key to be used by the HTTP server in TLS mode. The file must contain one private key in PEM format.
A string value providing the path to a file containing the server certificates to be used by the HTTP server in TLS mode. The file must contain one or more certificates in PEM format.
An integer value specifying the number of seconds Routinator should wait between consecutive validation runs in server mode. The next validation run will happen earlier, if objects expire earlier. The default is 600 seconds.
An integer value specifying the number of seconds an RTR client is requested to wait after it failed to receive a data set. The default is 600 seconds.
An integer value specifying the number of seconds an RTR client is requested to use a data set if it cannot get an update before throwing it away and continuing with no data at all. The default is 7200 seconds if it cannot get an update before throwing it away and continuing with no data at all. The default is 7200 seconds.
An integer value specifying how many change sets Routinator should keep in RTR server mode. The default is 10.
A string value containing a path pointing to the PID file to be used in daemon mode.
A string value containing a path to the working directory for the daemon process.
A string value containing the path any daemon process should use as its root directory.
A string value containing the user name a daemon process should run as.
A string value containing the group name a daemon process should run as.
An array containing arrays of two string values mapping the name of a TAL file (without the path but including the extension) as given by the first string to the name of the TAL to be included where the TAL is referenced in output as given by the second string.

If the options missing or if a TAL isn't mentioned in the option, Routinator will construct a name for the TAL by using its file name (without the path) and dropping the extension.


Routinator can provide an HTTP service allowing to fetch the Validated ROA Payload in various formats. The service does not support HTTPS and should only be used within the local network.

The service only supports GET requests with the following paths:

/metrics
Returns a set of monitoring metrics in the format used by Prometheus.
/status
Returns the current status of the Routinator instance. This is similar to the output of the /metrics endpoint but in a more human friendly format.

/api/v1/status
Returns the current status in JSON format.

/log
Returns the logging output of the last validation run. The log level matches that set upon start.

Note that the output is collected after each validation run and is therefore only available after the initial run has concluded.

/version
Returns the version of the Routinator instance.

/api/v1/validity/as-number/prefix
Returns a JSON object describing whether the route announcement given by its origin AS Number and address prefix is RPKI valid, invalid, or not found. The returned object is compatible with that provided by the RIPE NCC RPKI Validator. For more information, see https://ripe.net/support/documentation/developer-documentation/rpki-validator-api
/validity?asn=as-number&prefix=prefix
Same as above but with a more form-friendly calling convention.
/json-delta, /json-delta?session=session&serial=serial
Returns a JSON object with the changes since the dataset version identified by the session and serial query parameters. If a delta cannot be produced from that version, the full data set is returned and the member reset in the object will be set to true. In either case, the members session and serial identify the version of the data set returned and their values should be passed as the query parameters in a future request.

The members announced and withdrawn contain arrays with route origins that have been announced and withdrawn, respectively, since the provided session and serial. If reset is true, the withdrawn member is not present.

/json-delta/notify, /json-delta/notify?session=session&serial=serial
Returns a JSON object with two members session and serial which contain the session ID and serial number of the current data set.

If the session and serial query parameters are provided, and the session ID and serial number of the current data set are identical to the provided values, the request will not return until a new data set is available. This can be used as a means to get notified when the data set has been updated.


In addition, the current set of VRPs is available for each output format at a path with the same name as the output format. E.g., the CSV output is available at /csv.

These paths accept selector expressions to limit the VRPs returned in the form of a query string. The field select-asn can be used to filter for ASNs and the field select-prefix can be used to filter for prefixes. The fields can be repeated multiple times.

In addition, the query parameter include=more-specifics will cause the inclusion of VRPs for more specific prefixes of prefixes given via select-prefix.

Finally, the query parameter exclude can be used to exclude certain payload types from the response. The values routeOrigins, routerKeys, and aspas disable inclusion of route origins, router keys, and ASPAs, respectively. The values can either be given in separate exclude parameters or included in one separated by commas.

These parameters work in the same way as the options of the same name to the vrps command.

In order to allow diagnosis of the VRP data set as well as its overall health, Routinator logs an extensive amount of information. The log levels used by syslog are utilized to allow filtering this information for particular use cases.

The log levels represent the following information:

Information related to events that prevent Routinator from continuing to operate at all as well as all issues related to local configuration even if Routinator will continue to run.
Information about events and data that influences the set of VRPs produced by Routinator. This includes failures to communicate with repository servers, or encountering invalid objects.
Information about events and data that could be considered abnormal but do not influence the set of VRPs produced. For example, when filtering of unsafe VRPs is disabled, the unsafe VRPs are logged with this level.
Information about the internal state of Routinator that may be useful for, well, debugging.

In vrps and server mode, Routinator will produce a set of VRPs from the data published in the RPKI repository. It will walk over all certification authorities (CAs) starting with those referred to in the configured TALs.

Each CA is checked whether all its published objects are present, correctly encoded, and have been signed by the CA. If any of the objects fail this check, the entire CA will be rejected. If an object of an unknown type is encountered, the behaviour depends on the unknown-objects policy. If this policy has a value of reject the entire CA will be rejected. In this case, only certificates (.cer), CRLs (.crl), manifests (.mft), ROAs (.roa), and Ghostbuster records (.gbr) will be accepted.

If a CA is rejected, none of its ROAs will be added to the VRP set but also none of its child CAs will be considered at all; their published data will not be fetched or validated.

If a prefix has its ROAs published by different CAs, this will lead to some of its VRPs being dropped while others are still added. If the VRP for the legitimately announced route is among those having been dropped, the route becomes RPKI invalid. This can happen both by operator error or through an active attack.

In addition, if a VRP for a less specific prefix exists that covers the prefix of the dropped VRP, the route will be invalidated by the less specific VRP.

Because of this risk of accidentally or maliciously invalidating routes, VRPs that have address prefixes overlapping with resources of rejected CAs are called unsafe VRPs.

In order to avoid these situations and instead fall back to an RPKI unknown state for such routes, Routinator allows to filter out these unsafe VRPs. This can be enabled via the --unsafe-vrps=reject command line option or setting unsafe-vrps=reject in the config file.

By default, this filter is currently disabled but warnings are logged about unsafe VRPs. This allows to assess the operation impact of such a filter. Depending on this assessment, the default may change in future versions.

One exception from this rule are CAs that have the full address space assigned, i.e., 0.0.0.0/0 and ::/0. Adding these to the filter would wipe out all VRPs. These prefixes are used by the RIR trust anchors to avoid having to update these often. However, each RIR has its own address space so losing all VRPs should something happen to a trust anchor is unnecessary.

The documents defining RPKI include a number of very strict rules regarding the formatting of the objects published in the RPKI repository. However, because RPKI reuses existing technology, real-world applications produce objects that do not follow these strict requirements.

As a consequence, a significant portion of the RPKI repository is actually invalid if the rules are followed. We therefore introduce two decoding modes: strict and relaxed. Strict mode rejects any object that does not pass all checks laid out by the relevant RFCs. Relaxed mode ignores a number of these checks.

This memo documents the violations we encountered and are dealing with in relaxed decoding mode.

Resource certificates are defined as a profile on the more general Internet PKI certificates defined in RFC 5280.
The RFC restricts the type used for CommonName attributes to PrintableString, allowing only a subset of ASCII characters, while RFC 5280 allows a number of additional string types. At least one CA produces resource certificates with Utf8Strings.

In relaxed mode, we will only check that the general structure of the issuer and subject fields are correct and allow any number and types of attributes. This seems justified since RPKI explicitly does not use these fields.


Signed objects are defined as a profile on CMS messages defined in RFC 5652.
RFC 6488 demands all signed objects to be DER encoded while the more general CMS format allows any BER encoding -- DER is a stricter subset of the more general BER. At least one CA does indeed produce BER encoded signed objects.

In relaxed mode, we will allow BER encoding.

Note that this isn't just nit-picking. In BER encoding, octet strings can be broken up into a sequence of sub-strings. Since those strings are in some places used to carry encoded content themselves, such an encoding does make parsing significantly more difficult. At least one CA does produce such broken-up strings.





When receiving SIGUSR1, Routinator will attempt to reload the TALs and, if that succeeds, restart validation. If loading the TALs fails, Routinator will exit.
When receiving SIGUSR2 and logging to a file is enabled, Routinator will re-open the log file. If this fails, Routinator will exit.

Upon success, the exit status 0 is returned. If any fatal error happens, the exit status will be 1. Some commands provide a --complete option which will cause the exit status to be 2 if any of the rsync commands to update the repository fail.

Jaap Akkerhuis wrote the original version of this manual page, Martin Hoffmann extended it for later versions.

2018–2025, NLnet Labs

March 4, 2025 0.14.2
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