SCION

SCION (Scalability, Control, and Isolation On Next-Generation Networks) is a modern Future Internet architecture that aims to offer high availability and efficient point-to-point packet delivery, even in the presence of actively malicious network operators and devices. As of 2018 it is an ongoing research project led by researchers at ETH Zurich and, among other Future Internet proposals, is being explored in the Internet Engineering Task Force research group for path-aware networking. Goals Availability in the presence of distributed adversaries: As long as an attacker-free path between endpoints exists, it should be discovered and utilized with guaranteed bandwidth. Transparency and Control: Separation of control and data planes by encoding paths as packet-carried forwarding state (PCFS) in the packet header, as well as enabling of multipath communication for enhanced availability and defense against network attacks. Efficiency, Scalability, and Extensibility: Packet forwarding is at least as efficient in latency and throughput as current IP in common cases and more scalable with respect to BGP and the size of routing tables. Achieved by storing state in packet headers and protecting them cryptographically, using modern block ciphers such as AES that can be computed very efficiently (within 10ns on a modern CPU ). Support for Global but Heterogeneous Trust: Scale the authentication of entities to a global environment and utilizing trust agility so each end host or user can know the complete set of trust roots for the validation of a certificate. Deployability: Deployment should only require installation or upgrade of a few border routers, thus requiring minimal added complexity to the existing infrastructure. In addition, it should not disrupt current Internet topology and business models/relationships (e.g., should still support peering). Isolation domains and autonomous systems SCION introduces the concept of an isolation domain (ISD) which is a logical grouping of autonomous systems (ASes), administered by a smaller subset of the ASes that constitute the ISD core. The ISD is governed by a policy, called the trust root configuration (TRC), which is negotiated by the ISD core and defines the roots of trust that are used to validate bindings between names and public keys or addresses. ASes within an ISD can be connected by core links, customer-provider links, or peering links, representative of the relationship between the ASes.