SCION: Scalability, Control, and Isolation on Next-Generation Networks

Abstract

We present the first 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 trust domains, which then interconnect to form complete routes. Trust domains provide natural isolation 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. Meanwhile, SCION only assumes that a few top-tier ISPs in the trust domain are trusted for providing reliable end-to-end communications, thus achieving a small Trusted Computing Base. Both our security analysis and evaluation results show that SCION naturally prevents numerous attacks and provides a high level of resilience, scalability, control, and isolation.