By Gary Taylor, Solutions Architect
Discover how SCION is transforming internet routing, and how Anapaya and Megaport Virtual Edge are simplifying its adoption.
Enterprise internet routing is anything but simple. With distributed endpoints, data security, and service reliability to consider, it doesn’t take long for network teams to feel overwhelmed with a complicated mess of workarounds and add-ons that become increasingly difficult to oversee and manage.
But a new networking protocol has quickly disrupted the networking industry, offering a new routing method that can deliver superior, more secure, and more trustworthy internet compared to what the traditional workarounds provide – with far simpler management. Meet SCION.
Currently, the internet as we know it can’t provide the security, reliability, and performance that is often needed. Most businesses make it viable with additional platforms, services, and workarounds.
Without those workarounds, traffic is simply sent on an automatic basis, and the sender has no control over the path this traffic takes. As a result, data can be routed through vulnerable, unsafe, or congested networks. The consequences can be serious:
SCION stands for Scalability, Control, and Isolation On Next-Generation Networks. As described by The SCION Association, a non-profit organization established to act as a guardian and enabler of the protocol, “SCION is the first clean-slate Internet architecture designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communication.”
Often nicknamed “Internet 2.0”, SCION’s path-aware routing allows for route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for secure end-to-end communication. Much like how ChatGPT has disrupted the AI landscape, SCION is rapidly gaining traction as a transformative force in networking, especially for sectors operating mission-critical infrastructure.
The following industries are leading SCION adoption:
When you switch to SCION, key features of your architecture include:
When you opt for SCION over traditional networking, you’ll modernize your internet architecture with the following benefits.
With SCION, networks are referred to as Autonomous Systems (ASes). These ASes can be grouped into trust domains (known as isolation domains, or ISDs) with agreed trust policies.
These ISDs establish their own trust roots and maintain their own public key infrastructure (PKI) services, which cryptographically verify each participating AS so they aren’t reliant on third-party PKIs (such as global certificate authority).
This makes it easier to protect the privacy and integrity of your data, and supports compliance for industry sectors that require enhanced trust and data governance policies.
SCION discovers path segments and assembles these into available paths to destinations in advance. As a result SCION doesn’t rely on iterative BGP convergence, which is the process where BGP routers receive new information that causes them to recompute routes and refine the route table with each iteration.
With this feature, users can quickly switch between paths and use multiple paths simultaneously to increase resilience and reliability in their mission-critical networks, as well as protect against denial-of-service attacks.
With SCION, ASNs can influence how the topology is seen by others, as well as how they send and receive traffic from other ISDs, for more secure path validation. This is because unlike BGP, every hop on a SCION path between origin and destination is cryptographically verified – meaning particular attributes can be assigned or dynamically calculated for different paths.
This verification protects against route leaks, hijacks, and IP address spoofing for stronger validation.
SCION discovers path segments (hops) between networks, assembled into those cryptographically verified paths to which particular attributes can be assigned or dynamically calculated. Users can then select the preferred path/s to send their data over the internet based on optimal characteristics or other parameters like geofencing.
As SCION is based on internet protocols, it can utilize existing internet infrastructure. This means no changes are needed to the internal network infrastructure of a network operator, and devices that are SCION-enabled can utilize SCION gateways.
SCION is available as a licensed option via Anapaya based out of Zurich; an open-source deployment is also possible.
Anapaya Systems emerged out of the development of SCION at ETH Zurich University as a commercial provider of the SCION Protocol, offering extensive support for its three key services:
Anapaya is also a Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE)-enabled partner.
An interconnected network ecosystem of pre-arranged paths is essential for successful SCION deployment. This is where MVE comes in.
MVE is Megaport’s virtual network function hosting service, giving users private branch-to-cloud connectivity with reduced latency, jitter, and hops. With MVE you can build virtual firewalls, routers, and SD-WAN appliances without the need for physical infrastructure.
Customers can use an image from their choice of the market’s leading vendors to complement, expand, or replace existing infrastructure.
When you deploy SCION with Anapaya and MVE, you get all the benefits that come with using Megaport for your connectivity underlay:
SCION is redefining internet routing by addressing the security, reliability, and performance limitations of traditional networking. By integrating SCION into your network with Anapaya and MVE, you can build a scalable, high-performance network that simplifies deployment, enhances security, and reduces infrastructure costs.
Want to see it in action? Contact us for a demo and explore how SCION with Megaport can upgrade your network.
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