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.

contributed articles