Having every relying party on the Internet contact every publication service
is not terribly efficient. In many cases, it may make more sense to use a
hierarchical configuration in which a few "gatherer" relying parties contact
the publication servers directly, while a collection of other relying parties
get their raw data from the gatherers.
Note
The relying parties in this configuration still perform their own validation, they just let the gatherers do the work of collecting the unvalidated data for them.
A gatherer in a configuration like this would look just like a stand-alone
relying party as discussed above. The only real difference is that a gatherer
must also make its unauthenticated data collection available to other relying
parties. Assuming the standard configuration, this will be the directory
/var/rcynic/data/unauthenticated and its subdirectories.
There are two slightly different ways to do this with rsync:
- Via unauthenticated rsync, by configuring an
rsyncd.conf "module", or
- Via rsync over a secure transport protocol such as ssh.
Since the downstream relying party performs its own validation in any case,
either of these will work, but using a secure transport such as ssh makes it
easier to track problems back to their source if a downstream relying party
concludes that it's been receiving bad data.
Script for a downstream relying party using ssh might look like this:
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19 | #!/bin/sh -
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin
umask 022
eval `/usr/bin/ssh-agent -s` >/dev/null
/usr/bin/ssh-add /root/rpki_ssh_id_rsa 2>&1 | /bin/fgrep -v 'Identity added:'
hosts='larry.example.org moe.example.org curly.example.org'
for host in $hosts
do
/usr/bin/rsync --archive --update --safe-links rpkisync@${host}:/var/rcynic/data/unauthenticated/ /var/rcynic/data/unauthenticated.${host}/
done
eval `/usr/bin/ssh-agent -s -k` >/dev/null
for host in $hosts
do
/usr/sbin/chroot -u rcynic -g rcynic /var/rcynic /bin/rcynic -c /etc/rcynic.conf -u /data/unauthenticated.${host}
/var/rcynic/bin/rcynic-html /var/rcynic/data/rcynic.xml /usr/local/www/data/rcynic.${host}
done
cd /var/rcynic/rpki-rtr
/usr/bin/su -m rcynic -c '/usr/local/bin/rpki-rtr cronjob /var/rcynic/data/authenticated'
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where /root/rpki_ssh_id_rsa is an SSH private key authorized to log in as user
"rpkisync" on the gatherer machines. If you want to lock this down a little
tighter, you could use ssh's command="..." mechanism as described in the
sshd documentation to restrict the rpkisync user so that it can only run this
one rsync command.
If you prefer to use insecure rsync, perhaps to avoid allowing the downstream
relying parties any sort of login access at all on the gatherer machines, the
configuration would look more like this:
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16 | #!/bin/sh -
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin
umask 022
hosts='larry.example.org moe.example.org curly.example.org'
for host in $hosts
do
/usr/bin/rsync --archive --update --safe-links rsync://${host}/unauthenticated/ /var/rcynic/data/unauthenticated.${host}/
done
for host in $hosts
do
/usr/sbin/chroot -u rcynic -g rcynic /var/rcynic /bin/rcynic -c /etc/rcynic.conf -u /data/unauthenticated.${host}
/var/rcynic/bin/rcynic-html /var/rcynic/data/rcynic.xml /usr/local/www/data/rcynic.${host}
done
cd /var/rcynic/rpki-rtr
/usr/bin/su -m rcynic -c '/usr/local/bin/rpki-rtr cronjob /var/rcynic/data/authenticated'
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where "unauthenticated" here is an rsync module pointing at
/var/rcynic/data/unauthenticated on each of the gatherer machines.
Configuration for such a module would look like:
[unauthenticated]
read only = yes
transfer logging = yes
path = /var/rcynic/data/unauthenticated
comment = Unauthenticated RPKI data
