We present an Internet architecture designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communications. SCION separates ASes into groups of independent routing sub-planes, called isolation domains, which then interconnect to form complete routes.

Isolation domains provide natural separation of routing failures and human misconfiguration, give endpoints strong control for both inbound and outbound traffic, provide meaningful and enforceable trust, and enable scalable routing updates with high path freshness. As a result, our architecture provides strong resilience and security properties as an intrinsic consequence of good design principles, avoiding piecemeal add-on protocols as security patches.

Prof. Adrian Perrig
ETH Zürich, Network Security Group D-INFK, Schweiz