03.02.2022 – 13:32

The SCiON Internet is picking up speed

The Internet as we know it is built on the outdated and insecure Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). With the SCiON protocol, a new standard has been developed at ETH Zurich under the research team of Prof. Adrian Perrig, which makes data traffic on the Internet secure, stable and controllable. Last year, the replacement of BGP for the finance sector began with the launch of the Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN). Last week at SCiON DAY 2022, researchers , partners and customers presented current updates and an outlook on the further spread of SCiON usage. A better Internet based on SCiON is picking up speed.

Since the Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN) went live last year, the Swiss National Bank, the Swiss financial market services provider and exchange operator SIX, UBS and other banks have been using SCiON as an important technology in their interbanking communications, based on the values of trust and security. The SSFN has been continuously expanding since then and has started connecting more than 300 financial institutions this year. Government institutions are also already using SCiON, and companies in sensitive sectors of the economy such as healthcare and critical infrastructure are top priorities for using the technology. And in the medium term, SCiON will also solve the current conflict between security and user-friendliness on the Internet for private users.

At SCiON DAY 2022, which took place last week at ETH Zurich and online, researchers, partners and users presented exciting insights into the practice and further development of SCiON. Nearly 500 interested people from banking, insurance, telecommunications, retail, healthcare/pharma, logistics, defense and other government organizations followed along throughout the day. SCiON DAY 2022 was presented by ETH Zurich, Anapaya Systems AG and AWK Group. Videos of the individual presentations and panel discussions can be found at SCiON's official YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEqS2L18y5x8METk5a5LsX12edTTki3DV

Selected Highlights:

Vincent Graf Narbel, Strategic Technology Advisor of the ICRC, pointed out how central it is for the ICRC to have secure, non-compromisable communications in war zones and how SCiON can guarantee this important foundation and thus support and protect the victims of armed conflicts.
Florian Schütz, Federal Cybersecurity Delegate, used various examples to show how the complexity and costs of IT security can be massively reduced thanks to SCiON. SCiON enables a secure architecture and leads away from constant incident management.
Martin Bosshardt, CEO of ETH spin-off Anapaya Systems, which distributes SCiON in the market, spoke about new partnerships in Switzerland and abroad, including with Bank Vontobel, with Cyberlink, Telindus (Benelux), InterCloud, Extreme Networks, and infoGuard. Thanks to the cooperation with Swisscom, Sunrise and Switch, 80% of the population in Switzerland could already be integrated into the SCiON architecture. The Swiss army and the FDFA are also already on board, using SCiON to connect locations abroad, among other things. The Swiss HIN network of 80,000 doctors has also expressed interest in SCiON.
Olaf Swantee, former CEO of Sunrise and board member of Anapaya Systems, pointed out that with an expected 4.3 billion IoT connections in 2025, which also carry sensitive data, there are major potential cybercrime risks that could be eliminated thanks to SCiON.
Thomas Holderegger, Global Head of Security IT at UBS, explained that the massive increase in the number of cyber-attacks during the pandemic will hardly be reduced again. Secure connections, such as those made possible by SCiON, are therefore necessary for society as a whole.
Andréa Mächler, member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), explained that in addition to price stability and a stable financial system, the SNB must also guarantee a secure payment system. Thanks to SCiON, it can be ensured that even the weakest link in the banking system is secure.
Jos Dijsselhof, CEO SIX, highlighted the flexibility of SCiON, which enables secure any-to-any communication instead of point-to-point connections, as is common today with VPN. SIX's goal is to bring all Swiss banks onto SCiON and to roll out SCiON in the other fields in which SIX is active.
Technical innovations and the development of Green Routing were also presented at the SCiON DAY. Green Routing allows the SCiON user to select that data should only pass through nodes that are powered by renewable energy. This can actively reduce the global CO2 emissions of the ITC sector, which at around 3% accounts for about the same proportion of global CO2 emissions as air traffic.

About SCiON:

The BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), which is responsible for transmitting data over the Internet, is one of the most vulnerable parts of the Internet. Disruptions due to hijacking attempts, DDoS attacks, and trivial misconfigurations have led to outages that have caused enormous costs for businesses and serious consequences for institutions that rely on the Internet for critical services. Given the critical role of the Internet in modern life, businesses and governments cannot rely on BGP, which has remained unchanged since the late 1980s.

The SCiON (Scalability, Control and Isolation on Next-Generation Networks) Internet is the first pure Internet architecture to provide route control, fault isolation and explicit trust information for end-to-end communications. Built on today's Internet infrastructure, SCiON is "secure by design" and designed to remain stable in the face of major disruptions and even attacks by anti-state groups, representing a significant advance for global Internet connectivity. ETH Zurich researchers and independent auditors have developed mathematical proofs of SCiON's stability and security, guaranteeing safety from routing hijacks and providing complete control over where data is sent. https://scion-architecture.net

About Anapaya:

Anapaya Systems AG is a Swiss company whose goal is to build an international ecosystem providing SCiON-based services for a more reliable, secure, and stable networking experience. Our solutions provide organizations around the globe with a way to transport critical business data securely and transparently across the network, sending information between corporate sites, trusted partners, and cloud providers. We recently launched the Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN) with the Swiss National Bank and SIX.

Anapaya is located at Hardturmstrasse 253, 8005 Zürich, Switzerland and represented by Martin Bosshardt (CEO) and Samuel Hitz (CTO). https://www.anapaya.net/

Contact:

Contact Marketing & Communications: Leah Ladines, ladines@anapaya.net