The SCION Internet Architecture An Internet Architecture for the 21st Century

The Internet has been successful beyond even the most optimistic expectations. It permeates and intertwines with almost all aspects of our society and economy. The success of the Internet has created a dependency on communication as many of the processes underpinning the foundations of modern society would grind to a halt should communication become unavailable. However, much to our dismay, the current state of safety and availability of the Internet is far from commensurate with its importance. Although we cannot conclusively determine what the impact of a 1-minute, 1-hour, 1-day, or 1-week outage of Internet connectivity on our society would be, anecdotal evidence indicates that even short outages have a profound negative impact on governmental, economic, and societal operations [11]. To make matters worse, the Internet has not been primarily designed for high availability in the face of malicious actions by adversaries. Recent patches to improve Internet security and availability have been constrained by the design of the current Internet architecture. A new Internet architecture should offer availability, security by design, provide incentives for deployment, and consider economic, political, and legal issues at the design stage. We believe addressing these issues requires a new cohesive architecture that provides one fundamental building block: highly available point-to-point communication, which other proposed future Internet architectures that provide content-centric [9, 15], extensibility-centric [14], or mobilitycentric [23] properties could build upon. This article describes SCION (Scalability, Control, and Isolation On Next-generation networks), an inter-domain network architecture designed to address these issues. We discuss SCION’s goals, design, and functionality, as well as the results of 5 years of research conducted since the initial publication [29].