Open-Source Projects at LACNIC
03/12/2025
By Jorge Cano
As the year draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on everything we’ve accomplished. During 2025, we continued to work to offer the community high-quality projects that are worthy representatives of the region.
In the case of our flagship project FORT Validator, we fixed several errors and introduced multiple enhancements to its performance. FORT Validator is a free access, efficient, and reliable RPKI validator. We also implemented one of the features most often requested by operators: support for Prometheus. Prometheus has become the industry standard for monitoring and telemetry. Starting with the latest version of FORT (1.6.7), it’s now possible to monitor and obtain information from the validator using Prometheus.
But that is not the only news about FORT Validator. Throughout the year, we’ve been working on a new version with a completely updated architecture. The result is a more stable validator with improved performance that will allow us to implement new features more quickly and offer faster responses to operator suggestions and needs. The new version, which we have named FORT 2.0, will be available at the beginning of next year.
While developing FORT Validator 2.0, we also took on the task of automating tests. This allows us to detect errors before they reach users and reinforces our commitment to delivering quality to the community. To achieve this, we created new projects which were also released in open-source format and can be used freely.
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The first of these projects is called Barry (Bad Rpki RepositorY). This tool can generate test RPKI repositories, either valid or intentionally invalid, to verify the proper operation of validators, in this case the FORT Validator. Barry works by allowing the user to describe the desired repository in a text file and using a key-value format to define the attributes of the repository objects and adjust them to test specific behaviors or introduce errors. We expect this tool will be very useful for researchers and anyone implementing validators, as it will allow them to create test scenarios quickly and easily.
The second project is called Rapport. It is a set of automated tests that use Barry to generate valid and invalid RPKI repositories and then feed them to the RPKI validator to verify their correct operation. Rapport assesses various validator outputs to check whether they behaved as expected. Currently only the FORT Validator is supported, but the project can easily be extended to accommodate others. The main goal of this project is to provide a set of standard tests that can be executed with each new iteration of the FORT Validator. We also hope it will be useful for developing other validators and result in an ecosystem with more robust and stable validators, ultimately benefiting the industry.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of LACNIC.