THE INTERNET HAS been successful beyond even the
most optimistic expectations. It permeates almost
every aspect of our society and economy worldwide.
This success has created universal dependence
on communication, as many of the processes
underpinning modern society would grind to a
halt if it were unavailable. However, the state of the
safety and availability of the Internet is far from
commensurate with its importance.
Although we cannot conclusively determine what
the impact of even a one-minute outage of Internet
connectivity would be, anecdotal evidence suggests
that even a brief outage would have a profound
negative effect on governmental, economic, and
societal operations.
11 Making matters worse, the
Internet is not designed primarily for high availability
in the face of malicious actions by adversaries. Recent
patches to improve Internet security and availability
are indeed constrained by the design of the current
The SCION
Internet
Architecture
DOI: 10.1145/3085591
Adhering to the end-to-end principle even
more than the current Internet yields highly
available point-to-point communication.
BY DAVID BARRERA, LAURENT CHUAT, ADRIAN PERRIG,
RAPHAEL M. REISCHUK, AND PAWEL SZALACHOWSKI
key insights
˽ Patching the current Internet is an
undesirable long-term solution; a clean-slate redesign of inter-domain routing
would provide many benefits and is
surprisingly simple to deploy using legacy
protocols for intra-domain communication.
˽ SCION’s isolation domains offer control-plane isolation and scoped trust; rather
than restrict communication, they provide
transparency for path selection, packet
forwarding, and authentication.
˽ SCION’s packet-carried forwarding
state eliminates the need for inter-domain routing table lookups, improves
forwarding performance, and supports
multipath communication; packet-carried
forwarding state gives path control to
senders, providing scalability, security,
and availability benefits.
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