One of the interesting points about SCION is that it achieves today's required forwarding performance <i>on commodity hardware</i>. No more expensive and inefficient TCAMs, no more limits to scalability. This, among other features of SCION, provides an economic incentive for ISPs and organizations to switch to SCION eventually.
SCION feels like---and from the FAQ its developers agree---MPLS applied to the inter-system problem. Many of the advantages it has, such as very high performance routing at intermediary nodes, are more or less inherited from the MPLS design. What it adds on top of MPLS is a route discovery/setup mechanism that is far more suited to border gateway use, with security and integrity precautions.<p>Additionally, SCION comes with COLIBRI, a reservation-based QoS system that at least on brief reading seems to have much of the power of RSVP with MPLS to provide dedicated bandwidth for media applications. It will of course face the challenges of operating between domains without complete mutual trust, which is what has generally killed resource reservation on the internet (I mean, besides software engineers always thinking resource reservation is too hard).<p>MPLS is, in my opinion, and under-rated protocol, and it's cool to see the label switching concept being developed into the future.
Sounds like source routing. It’s an idea that was abandoned early on, but I’d be interested in learning if things are different. Sometimes old abandoned ideas can be revisited due to new approaches, algorithmic or design innovation, or Moore’s law.
This is academically interesting and it's cool to see that there seems to be a business model for it as well <a href="https://www.anapaya.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.anapaya.net/</a>
The tech is exciting which can be summarized to support the following (business|security|gatekeeping) -scenarios:<p>1) geo-fencing service for enterprise customers (think public sector, or ICS, which may have a strong need to guarantee a packet never leaves a jurisdiction)<p>2) geo-fencing political or legal jurisdictions. e.g. "great firewall type of scenarios" that would align all participants of an economic bloc into this walled garden. (sure it will be packaged with different language)<p>3) "transparency" in the data plane while isolating the control plane.<p>4) traffic shaping & QoS: think a faster lane for streaming content and a slower lane for other "less critical" content. What is critical might depend on the discretion of the carrier (the whole net-neutrality topic on "not all packets are created equal" again.<p>5) DDoS mitigation (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546214" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546214</a>)<p>Imagine what the Internet looks like if ISP's could guarantee customers (such as a Swiss bank, an ICS, a chemical plant) that a packet will never leave a certain jurisdiction. But in the name of fighting copyright laws, cracking down on the "evil" sci-hub, or (outrage alert) terrorists "who download a bear over Tor". SCION breaks much of decentralized ideas, p2p, torrents, and other tech that relies on over-the-top routing much more efficiently and totally vendor agnostic (no need to ask Huawei, Nokia, Ericcsson to provide fancy features in the OAM plane). Hell even VPN's can easily be gotten rid of (in jurisdictions not sanctioned by your ISP).<p>Arguably the effects on how dystopian this will turn out depend on how an ISP bundles and implements such a technology. The Swiss (in the West) are usually trusted with not doing "shady stuff" (at least not until you study things like <i>Crypto AG</i>). The optimism for such a system might be different if you're in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, or Kazakhstan or want to protect yourself from things like the "Bundestrojaner".<p>Whether this is good or bad all depends on if you like the idea of walls/silos in the name of security, how much you trust your state and if you think there are people who get thrown under the bus by that state. Because ultimately it's about more power to the authority.<p>Personally I'm not convinced about this being better for security because it will not eliminate/mitigate more issues than it will create on its own (depending on which country you are in this threat might be more or less severe to you). Apart from the superior-security sales angle it will further lead to a "balkanization of the Internet".<p>This technology is extremely political and so there is little surprise it has momentum now when the focus is on isolating ourselves. See 1) Above - this value proposition isn't just great for off-shore banks, but also for countries who want less exposure to traffic from other countries (for whatever reason! think copyright laws, political sanctions, incompatible "human rights", or content-control e.g. social / free-speech / whatever values our own overlords might disagree with). SCION allows fine grained control over what to impose on who and helps with censorship since not everyone will be affected, it allows micro sanctions on anyone they disagree with and it will be harder for them to say it's happening because only they experience it. Think of it as a great-firewall-lite without all the political stigma and dressed up in the language of "security".<p>BGP is a hot mess and I'm all in favor of replacing it says my Tech brain. My human brain says BGP is a hot mess not only because it's old but it's incredibly political. The problems we're trying to solve are not all technical. Looking at the world in 2021 I want more dialogue on how we can solve our non technical issues of war and foreign policy failures everywhere before we build more walls. It's a tough one.
Stolen from the article:<p>> “So, essentially SCION is an architecture to provide an alternative to BGP”, Adrian started his presentation. “There are some principles which are quite different from the current Internet.” For example, the SCION architecture follows a stateless packet forwarding approach - i.e., there's no per-flow state in routers and thus no opportunity for inconsistent state.<p>See an explanation of BGP here: <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-is-bgp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-i...</a>.<p>So in my basic understanding of how the internet works, tl;dr SCION is a different way to transmit packets between computers, particularly over large distances.