When a service is on the Internet, it can be accessed by everyone, everywhere. While that’s the superpower of today's Internet, it comes at a cost: a massive attack surface with exploitable vulnerabilities.
The Internet is growing exponentially. This faster-than-ever growth is mainly driven by Internet of Things (IoT) devices like cameras, smoke detectors, light bulbs, and other low-profile applications. Many of these IoT devices are designed on the cheap, making them easy to attack; introducing a whole new, rapidly growing class of compromised devices.
Such compromised devices are sitting ducks for hackers: easy and cheap to use as attackable infrastructure. We face a degradation of attack costs, while defense costs are growing –an unfortunate imbalance in favor of the attacker.
So, even if you haven't had any cyber incidents so far, you are still a target, and the probability of being hit is growing higher every day. Sadly, existing cybersecurity solutions are not adequate, especially when it comes to ensuring availability and cyber resilience.
When using the Internet as a communication layer for critical applications, confidentiality and authentication is not provided by the network and does require additional, specific cybersecurity solutions. In general, such applications introduce the required security properties based on encryption of the payload. This is essentially a cyber catch-22: such security applications provide the required important security properties while simultaneously introducing a new set of attack vectors.
SCION provides the required confidentiality and authentication properties as an integral part of the routing protocol. That is how SCION addresses the root cause behind most cyberattacks.
Next to its improved security properties, SCION introduces the first hyper-scalable, route-based protocol, which allows network participants to communicate over many routes at the same time. SCION provides unseen resilience and interruption-free connectivity even during disturbances based on large partial network outages.
Existing encryption-based security solutions like SD-WAN do work perfectly and complementarily on SCION networks. Such network security solutions profit from the improved security on the network layer and also show faster performance and interruption-free resilience on the application layer.
Taking a step back, if you are still unsure about the groundbreaking benefits of SCION, read the SCION myth "SCION offers no clear benefits" for the big picture.