What if we could create the Internet architecture from scratch? You might think that this is a crazy endeavor, but that's exactly what a research team in Zurich, Switzerland, is doing. And for good reason.

In today's episode, we are joined by Nicola Rustignoli, a research assistant at the Network Security Group at ETH Zürich, to take a look at the history of the Internet, its purpose, the challenges it has introduced, and the path forward to an Internet that allows for its intent to be met while maintaining scalability, control, and resiliency. Nicola works on making the Internet more secure and reliable with the SCION Architecture and by helping to start the SCION Foundation.

SCION was born as a research project 11 years ago, from the research question: how secure can an Internet be? There's a lot to learn from this project.

About the SCION Architecture SCION is the first clean-slate Internet architecture designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communication. SCION organizes existing ASes into groups of independent routing planes, called isolation domains, which interconnect to provide global connectivity. Isolation domains provide natural isolation of routing failures and misconfigurations, 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, the SCION architecture provides strong resilience and security properties as an intrinsic consequence of its design. Besides high security, SCION also provides a scalable routing infrastructure, and high efficiency for packet forwarding. As a path-based architecture, SCION end hosts learn about available network path segments, and combine them into end-to-end paths that are carried in packet headers. Thanks to embedded cryptographic mechanisms, path construction is constrained to the route policies of ISPs and receivers, offering path choice to all the parties: senders, receivers, and ISPs. This approach enables path-aware communication, an emerging trend in networking. These features also enable multi-path communication, which is an important approach for high availability, rapid failover in case of network failures, increased end-to-end bandwidth, dynamic traffic optimization, and resilience to DDoS attacks.

Why a clean-slate design? Why can't we adopt existing solutions? Is it easy to "replace" the Internet?

Listen in to learn more about this exciting program.

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Guest Nicola Rustignoli Research Assistant at ETH Zürich and Founding Engineer at the SCION Association. On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicola-rustignoli-830b7512/ On Twitter | https://twitter.com/Nicorusti On YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCATqViXMlA0cCroLuoJVAGw

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This Episode’s Sponsors

Imperva: https://itspm.ag/imperva277117988

HITRUST: https://itspm.ag/itsphitweb

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Resources

Learn more about SCION: https://scion-architecture.net/ On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/78769571 On Twitter: https://twitter.com/SCIONassociatio On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SCIONinternet

SCION Day 2022 videos: https://scion-architecture.net/pages/scion_day_2022/

“The Complete Guide to SCION” is coming out with Springer Verlag in June 2022. An old version is open access and available on scion-architecture.net

The White House & 50 more countries recently released a Declaration for the Future of Internet: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Declaration-for-the-Future-for-the-Internet_Launch-Event-Signing-Version_FINAL.pdf

The FCC recently launched an inquiry about routing security: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-launches-inquiry-internet-routing-vulnerabilities

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