sECURE YOUR NETWORK.
Secure your business.
Cybersecurity threats AND ISSUES ON THE INTERNET TODAY
Data breaches, manipulation & theft
Eavesdropping, data manipulation, theft, and redirection are daily occurrences on the global Internet leading to loss of trust and financial repercussions.
Lack of data compliance & sovereignty
Today’s Internet may send data through different countries and over unsafe or congested networks. Businesses have no control over the path through which their data is sent.
Network downtime & service unavailability
Data loss, delays, and denial-of-service attacks can disrupt business operations, while Internet paths can take some time to update in case of outages, thereby threatening availability.
High costs of dedicated infrastructure
Given the risks of using the Internet, many critical infrastructures run on segregated networks that are often aging, very costly, and offer limited connectivity options.
FOUR KEY REASONS TO DEPLOY SCION
Secure communication
SCION offers robust security features, including prevention against various types of cyber attacks. It employs cryptographic techniques and secure routing protocols to ensure data integrity and confidentiality.
Reliable connectivity
Data sovereignty and control
Transparent governance
Fit for your needs – DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Critical infrastructure ecosystems
SCION-enabled networks provide trusted and reliable connectivity for the secure exchange of data between businesses and other organizations.
Connecting remote users
SCION improves connectivity to remote users by allowing users to send data over optimised SCION networks.
Applications
Leverage reliable connectivity and improve user experience by building native SCION connectivity into your applications, thereby facilitating more secure and reliable end-to-end connections.
MARKET FIT AND USE CASES
Enhance security and reliability across critical sectors with SCION, designed to meet the specialized needs of today’s businesses.
CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Finance
Secure inter-bank communication
Regulatory compliance and peace of mind for financial institutions who require elevated security and compliance assurances
Cross-border transactions
Expand your global reach confidently with trust policies for reliable and secure cross-border transactions.
Real-time payments
Stay online with fast and secure connections for real-time payments, with robust backup in case of problems like outages, congestion, or cyberattacks.
B2C financial transactions
Navigate regulatory complexities effortlessly and ensure your transactions reach the right destination, minimizing chances for surveillance or attacks.
As cashless payments become more prevalent, ensure the availability of payment terminals with SCION.
Healthcare
Strict regulatory requirements for healthcare operators
Regulatory compliance and peace of mind for healthcare organizations needing assurances about location of data, even while traversing the network.
Patient data exchange
Ensure patient data is shared securely within national boundaries, adhering to strict privacy laws.
Cross-jurisdictional health data transfer
Confidently expand the scope of your healthcare services with secure and reliable transfer mechanisms for personal medical data across different jurisdictions.. Transfer sensitive research data and healthcare statistics between jurisdictions.
Deploy SCION to guarantee low-latency, real-time communication solutions for critical healthcare scenarios such as emergency responses and remote surgeries, ensuring uninterrupted service with fail-safe systems.
Navigate the complexities of healthcare IT with robust, resilient connectivity. SCION minimizes the risk of disruptions due to outages, congestion, or cyber threats, ensuring that healthcare services remain operational when most needed.
Telemedicine and virtual care platforms
With telemedicine and telesurgery, network stability and latency becomes a key factor to delivering successful care. SCION provides optimized network paths that are fit for the purpose.
Education
Ensure that communications within research and education institutes are secure and trusted, particularly when handling sensitive personal, academic and research data. SCION also enables R&E institutes to meet stringent regulatory and governance requirements with robust cryptographic assurances.
Enable secure and precise transfer of sensitive research data between jurisdictions. SCION ensures that data travels via known and secure paths, maintaining integrity and confidentiality across borders.
Leverage the global SCION research and education network to support innovation around next generation networking. For more about the SCION education network, click here.
Power
Adhere to national and international regulatory standards such as NIS2 with strong cryptographic assurances about who you’re communicating with. SCION protects critical power generation and distribution systems, ensuring secure communications and safeguarding against cyber threats.
Protect your legacy SCADA systems, which are vital for controlling and monitoring power equipment but often have limited security features. SCION provides robust protection, even for systems that are increasingly exposed to the Internet.
Maintain essential control functions with reliable, low-latency communication solutions. Ensure strong assurances of delivery to the correct destination with the capability to operate over known and secure paths.
As power generation shifts towards more distributed renewable energy, ensure your utility systems remain robust. SCION offers reliable, resilient, and secure connectivity, integrating seamlessly with IoT environments and offering fast failover in case of outages, congestion, or cyberattacks.
Aviation
Meet stringent national and international regulatory requirements such as NIS2 with strong cryptographic assurances of who you’re communicating with. Protect the diverse network of aviation systems, ensuring secure and trusted communications amid increasing cyber threats.
Strengthen the security of mission critical aviation systems, including air traffic control systems, which, despite their critical nature, may have Internet exposure. SCION’s security enhancements ensure these vital systems can resist cyber threats while maintaining the highest levels of reliability and integrity.
Maintain crucial control functions with our dependable, low-latency communication solutions that guarantee strong assurances of accurate delivery. These communications are designed to operate over known and secure paths within specific jurisdictions to meet operational and regulatory needs.
As the backbone of your aviation operations, SCION provides robust, resilient, and secure communications. Adapt to the challenges of distributed systems and varied operational environments seamlessly.
Government
Adhere to national regulatory and governance standards with strong cryptographic assurances of who you’re communicating with. Ensure that communications within and between government departments and agencies remain secure, particularly when transferring sensitive personal data like biometric, social security, health and tax records.
Facilitate the safe and accurate transfer of personal data within specific national jurisdictions, following established paths to ensure compliance with data protection and security regulations. In addition,different SCION networks can mutually communicate with one another in a trusted, controlled and secure fashion.
Support critical operations such as disaster management, civil protection, traffic management, and defense with reliable, low-latency communication for voice, video, and data, ensuring crucial continuity and integrity.
Maintain robust, resilient, and secure connectivity across all public and internal government IT systems. SCION is designed to withstand outages, route around congestion, and mitigate cyberattacks, ensuring governmental operations are always available and secure.
REMOTE USERS AND CRITICAL APPLICATIONS
Blockchain
Protect against eclipse attacks
Secure your blockchain against eclipse attacks where malicious actors isolate a node to manipulate the blockchain. Our advanced security protocols are designed to maintain node integrity and ensure continuous, decentralized connectivity, preventing attackers from compromising the network.
Home office VPN
With the increase in remote work, corporate network vulnerabilities have also risen, particularly due to VPNs acting as the entry point into corporate networks. SCION can enhance your network's security by reducing VPN exposure, helping to prevent denial-of-service and intrusion attacks.
Gaming
Cryptographic security for gaming integrity
In an industry where the stakes continue to rise with substantial revenue and prize money on the line, secure your competitive gaming environment with resilient connectivity and secure network paths.
Reliable real-time gaming communications
Elevate the gaming experience with ultra-reliable, low-latency communication solutions that ensure smooth, uninterrupted gameplay that keeps players engaged and competitive.. SCION can withstand the rigours of high-demand gaming environments, ensuring that connections remain stable even during peak times.
SCION in action
STRENGTHENING SWISS FINANCE WITH SSFN AND SCION
Read how SCION secured the Swiss financial industry, enabling secure and resilient digital communication thanks to the SSFN.
HOME OFFICE: A MORE SECURE NETWORK WITH SCION
See how the Swiss National Bank is using the SCION technology to secure their remote work network.
SCION’s impact on the education and research sector
A look at how SCION improved network reliability and security in communication between educational institutions.
YOUR ROADMAP TO BECOMING A SCION USER
Network needs and topology definition
First, you need to evaluate your network’s specific requirements and goals, including deployment scale, geographic spread, traffic patterns, and security concerns. Next, you’ll define your network’s layout, covering its physical and logical structure, like node placement, connectivity, and communication paths.
Get SCION connectivity from Internet providers offering SCION
Start building your SCION-powered network
SCION providers TODAY
Ergon Informatik AG
VTX
InfoGuard
Swiss IX
Telindus
LGU+
GÉANT
Init7
EveryWare
Extreme Networks
Digital Realty
AWS
InterCloud
Frequently asked questions
Can SCION be implemented for international network needs?
Yes, while the largest early adopter community is based in Switzerland, SCION is increasingly available worldwide. For example, the SCION Education network (SCIERA) already spans four continents. Through providers such as Anapaya and Digital Realty, SCION is available in more and more regions. Additionally, because SCION is relatively easy for ISPs to adopt, they are generally open to deploying SCION routers if there is concrete customer demand. Thus, if there were a demand for international SCION connections, the implementation would be easy and quick.
What equipment and connectivity do I need?
To use SCION, you need one or more SCION lines from one of the SCION ISPs. These lines often come with SCION-IP gateways, allowing you to leverage SCION for IP-based applications.
How do I set up a trust domain (ISD or Isolation Domain)?
We recommend that you join one of the existing SCION domains. If you need to create your own ISD, please get in touch. The technical details for creating an ISD are described in the SCION PKI specification.
How long will it take me to integrate SCION?
SCION can be enabled in days if you already have connectivity from a SCION-enabled ISP. Otherwise, you’ll need to factor in some time to procure a new SCION line.
How do I join the SSFN, SSHN or any other network already in place?
These networks are built as a SCION Isolation Domain (ISD), and as such, they determine the joining process. Please check the list of assigned ISDs to find links about how to join: anapaya.net/ressources/isd-as-assignments.
What is the deployment status today? Who is using SCION?
A list of SCION networks is available under the list of assigned SCION ISDs and ASes. Note that each SCION ISD may decide whether to publish its participating ASes or not, therefore the list is non-exhaustive. For more: anapaya.net/ressources/isd-as-assignments.
How is SCION different from SD-WAN/SASE?
SD-WAN solutions provide connectivity among sites on top of regular Internet lines. Such solutions are limited to a single network domain and usually a single vendor, while SCION is like an Internet, where connectivity is provided by multiple ISPs and vendors. SD-WAN can only choose the “last mile” to be used, while SCION allows full end-to-end path customization, allowing it to react to failures and degradations even if they happen in the “middle” of the Internet. In addition, SCION can provide geofencing, which cannot be provided over regular Internet with SD-WAN. Ultimately, SCION offers built-in hijacking resistance and path authorization, which is not provided when using SD-WAN over Internet.
How is SCION different from OSPF, SDN, or MPLS?
SCION is used for inter-domain communication. For intra-domain routing, each SCION network (Autonomous System) can use any protocol, such as OSPF, SDN, or MPLS-based forwarding. SCION’s hop fields may resemble MPLS tags, but they have authentication and integrity protection.
Why is my firewall not enough?
While a firewall filters traffic to/from your local network, it cannot mitigate risks of data in transit: connectivity interruptions, data transiting untrusted parts of the Internet, path hijacks.
How is SCION different from a normal virtual L2 link where we do IPSec on top?
SCION provides similar availability and security to a private line (e.g. a virtual L2 link), combined with the benefit of being Internet-like: connectivity is provided by multiple providers, and can continue uninterrupted even if a whole provider fails. SCION lines from different providers can be seamlessly combined, and the use of native multipath allows to achieve better performance than a “fixed-path” virtual L2 circuit. It offers the flexibility of the Internet along with the security typically associated with private lines, providing a comprehensive and economical solution for modern cybersecurity challenges.
Why should I use SCION over private line?
SCION is a great fit for ecosystems, where many stakeholders need to mutually communicate. As the SCION network is built by a “federation” of ISPs, it does not have single points of failure. In addition, regular private lines usually leverage fixed paths, while SCION provides native multipath, allowing better performance by selecting the best path.
I’d like to download and use SCION, what can I do?
A list of SCION applications, implementations, etc. is available here: github.com/scionproto/awesome-scion. Binaries and software installation packages for the open-source SCION implementation can be downloaded from the GitHub release page, github.com/scionproto/scion/releases. Instructions can be found in the manual, docs.scion.org/en/latest/manuals/install.html
My organization would like to try SCION out. What are some of the use cases for which it is useful and how can we get started?
Check some of our case studies about SCION deployments in the field of finance, critical infrastructure, education, and more: link to case studies.
GET IN TOUCH IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE
Ready to enhance your network? Contact our experts today to see how SCION can transform your business network.