SCION and network security glossary

Anapaya CORE is the SCION routing infrastructure product designed for connectivity providers (ISPs, telcos, carriers). It enables providers to offer SCION connectivity to their customers by operating as a SCION Autonomous System. CORE handles beaconing, path registration, and inter-domain routing within the SCION network.

Anapaya EDGE is a SCION-based product for building private enterprise WANs. Anapaya EDGE is a software-based network appliance solution that functions as a secure entry point, or gateway, for an organization's network to access the SCION Internet. Its key feature, SCION Secure Access Groups (SAG), enables organizations to create invite-only network segments that are isolated from the public Internet. EDGE provides an alternative to MPLS, SD-WAN, and VPN solutions by enforcing security at the network layer rather than through overlay stacks. It supports hybrid cloud integrations, partner connectivity, and multi-provider resilience.

Anapaya GATE is a product that secures public-facing services accessed by remote users. Anapaya GATE acts as a gateway to the SCION Internet. It allows organizations to make Internet-exposed services (eBanking platforms, web applications, IoT data collectors) accessible only to authorized ISPs and their users on the SCION Internet, while remaining invisible to the public Internet. This reduces the attack surface by up to 99.99%, preventing DDoS attacks and reducing the risk of intrusion attacks that can lead to ransomware.

The attack surface is the total set of points where an unauthorized user can attempt to enter, extract data from, or disrupt a system. In networking, the attack surface includes every publicly visible endpoint, port, protocol, and service. Reducing the attack surface is a foundational cybersecurity principle: the fewer entry points available to attackers, the lower the risk of a successful breach. SCION reduces the network attack surface architecturally by hiding endpoints from unauthorized entities.

Attack surface reduction refers to the practice of minimizing the number of exploitable entry points in a system or network. In traditional networking, this involves firewalls, access controls, and network segmentation. SCION offers an architectural approach: by making network endpoints invisible to unauthorized entities, it eliminates the attack surface that most cyberattacks exploit, rather than attempting to defend it.

An Autonomous System (AS) is a collection of IP networks and routers under the control of a single organization that presents a common routing policy to the Internet. Each AS is identified by a unique AS number (ASN). Autonomous Systems communicate with each other using BGP. In SCION, Autonomous Systems are organized into isolation domains (ISDs) with cryptographic trust relationships, replacing BGP’s implicit trust model.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol that directs traffic between Autonomous Systems on the Internet. BGP was designed in the late 1980s when the Internet was a small community of trusted institutions, and it has no built-in mechanism to verify that route announcements are legitimate. This lack of authentication makes BGP vulnerable to hijacking, route leaks, and other manipulation attacks that can redirect or intercept Internet traffic.

BGP hijacking occurs when an attacker falsely announces ownership of IP address prefixes via the Border Gateway Protocol, redirecting Internet traffic through their own network. Because BGP has no built-in authentication, any Autonomous System can announce any prefix, making the entire Internet vulnerable to route manipulation. SCION eliminates BGP hijacking by replacing BGP’s implicit trust model with cryptographic path verification.

A BGP route leak is typically an accidental event where a network misconfiguration causes BGP routes to be announced to unintended peers. Unlike BGP hijacking, which is deliberate, route leaks are usually the result of human error. However, both exploit the same underlying BGP vulnerability (lack of authentication) and both can cause significant traffic disruption, service outages, and data exposure.

Critical infrastructure refers to the systems, networks, and assets that are essential for the functioning of a society and economy. This includes energy grids, water supply, healthcare, financial services, transportation, and telecommunications. Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure can cause widespread disruption, economic damage, and threats to public safety. Protecting critical infrastructure connectivity is a primary use case for SCION.

Cryptographic path verification is SCION’s mechanism for ensuring routing integrity. Each Autonomous System along a network path cryptographically signs the path segment it propagates. Routers will only forward packets along paths that have been explicitly authorized and verified. This prevents attackers from injecting false routing information, making BGP hijacking architecturally impossible within SCION networks.

Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to continuously deliver intended outcomes despite adverse cyber events. It goes beyond cybersecurity (preventing attacks) to encompass detection, response, recovery, and adaptation. A cyber-resilient organization can maintain operations even when under active attack. SCION contributes to cyber resilience through architectural features: multi-path routing provides automatic failover, and hidden endpoints prevent attacks from reaching critical services.

Data sovereignty is the principle that data is subject to the laws and governance of the country or jurisdiction in which it is collected, stored, or processed. In networking, data sovereignty requires control over which geographic jurisdictions and network operators traffic traverses. SCION enables data sovereignty at the network layer through sender-controlled path selection, ensuring sensitive data does not pass through unauthorized or foreign infrastructure.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack overwhelms a target server, service, or network with a flood of traffic from multiple sources, making it unavailable to legitimate users. DDoS attacks exploit the fact that endpoints on the traditional Internet are publicly discoverable. SCION addresses this by making endpoints invisible to unauthorized entities, reducing the attack surface by up to 99.99%.

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a European Union regulation specifically targeting the financial sector. It requires banks, insurance companies, investment firms, and financial infrastructure providers to ensure their ICT systems can withstand, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks and operational disruptions. DORA mandates third-party risk management, ICT incident reporting, and regular resilience testing.

Failover is the automatic switching from a failed or degraded system, component, or network path to a backup. In enterprise networking, failover speed determines how quickly services recover from disruptions. Traditional Internet routing can take minutes to reconverge after a failure. SCION provides sub-second failover through multi-path routing: if a path fails, traffic switches to an alternative path without disrupting the application session.

An isolation domain (ISD) is a logical grouping of Autonomous Systems within the SCION architecture, governed by a shared trust root configuration (TRC). Each ISD operates as an independent routing plane with its own roots of trust, meaning that routing decisions and trust relationships within one ISD are isolated from those in another. This isolation provides architectural security: traffic within an ISD cannot be influenced by entities outside it.

A leased line is a dedicated, private telecommunications circuit between two locations, rented from a provider on a fixed monthly basis. Leased lines offer consistent bandwidth and low latency but are expensive, inflexible, and create single-provider concentration risk. SCION-based enterprise WANs can replace leased lines with multi-provider Internet connectivity while maintaining equivalent or better security isolation.

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a networking technology that routes traffic using short path labels rather than long network addresses, creating dedicated paths between locations. MPLS is widely used in enterprise WANs because it provides reliable, low-latency connectivity with traffic isolation. However, MPLS is expensive per node, inflexible, and creates vendor lock-in with a single provider, making it increasingly difficult to justify as enterprises adopt cloud and hybrid architectures.

Multi-path routing is a networking capability that allows traffic to be sent along multiple paths simultaneously or to fail over between paths instantly. In SCION, multi-path routing is native to the architecture: if a path fails or becomes congested, traffic is redirected to an alternative path in under one second, without disrupting the application session. This provides resilience that is not possible with traditional single-path Internet routing.

Network latency is the time it takes for a data packet to travel from its source to its destination across a network, typically measured in milliseconds. High latency degrades application performance, particularly for real-time services (trading platforms, video, IoT). SCION’s path control allows organizations to select paths optimized for low latency, and multi-path routing ensures that congested or degraded paths are avoided automatically.

Network resilience is the ability of a network to maintain acceptable service levels during adverse conditions, including hardware failures, cyberattacks, provider outages, and natural disasters. Key factors include path redundancy, failover speed, and provider diversity. SCION’s multi-path routing and multi-provider architecture provide sub-second failover, ensuring business continuity even when individual network paths or providers fail.

The NIS2 Directive (Network and Information Security Directive 2) is a European Union cybersecurity directive that came into force in 2023. It requires organizations operating critical infrastructure (energy, finance, healthcare, transport, digital infrastructure) to implement comprehensive cybersecurity risk management measures. Non-compliance can result in significant fines. NIS2 expands the scope of the original NIS Directive to cover more sectors and imposes stricter incident reporting requirements.

Path control is a core feature of the SCION architecture that allows the sender of data to select the network path their traffic takes, rather than relying on routers to make routing decisions. In SCION, the sender assembles an end-to-end path from cryptographically verified segments based on their own preferences: latency, security, geographic jurisdiction, or cost. This is fundamentally different from the Internet, where the BGP protocol defines the route.

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that encrypts a victim’s files or systems and demands payment (usually in cryptocurrency) for the decryption key. Ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure (healthcare, energy, government) have increased dramatically, with attackers targeting organizations that cannot afford extended downtime. The average cost of a data breach reached USD 4.9 million in 2024.

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a framework that allows networks to cryptographically sign Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs), verifying which Autonomous System is authorized to announce a specific IP prefix. Routers enforcing Route Origin Validation (ROV) can reject announcements that contradict these records. However, RPKI only validates route origin, not the full path, and as of 2025, only approximately 54% of IP prefixes are covered by valid ROAs.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a network architecture framework that combines SD-WAN capabilities with cloud-based security services (firewall-as-a-service, secure web gateway, CASB, zero trust network access). SASE aims to provide secure, optimized connectivity for distributed enterprises. However, SASE components run over the public Internet and add cost, complexity, and their own attack surface - SASE security tools have themselves been targets of zero-day exploits.

SCION (Scalability, Control, and Isolation on Next-generation Networks) is an inter-network routing protocol developed at ETH Zurich. SCION is a new routing protocol that overcomes the vulnerabilities of the BGP protocol used to route data on the Internet. SCION enables cryptographically verified path control, multi-path routing, built-in DDoS prevention, and data sovereignty at the network layer. SCION is deployed in production networks including the Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN) and the Secure Swiss Utility Network (SSUN). Anapaya - The SCION Company - developed and operates the commercial SCION platform for enterprise deployment.

SCION Secure Access Groups (SAG) is a feature of Anapaya EDGE that allows enterprises to build private, invite-only WANs on the SCION Internet. Each Secure Access Group defines which organizations, sites, and users can communicate with each other, enforcing isolation at the network level. SAG provides an alternative to MPLS, SD-WAN, and VPN architectures for organizations that need strong network isolation combined with the flexibility of Internet-based connectivity.

SD-WAN is a networking approach that uses software to manage and optimize traffic routing across a wide area network, typically leveraging broadband, LTE, and MPLS connections. SD-WAN reduces bandwidth costs compared to MPLS but runs over the public Internet, exposing enterprises to BGP hijacking, DDoS attacks, and zero-day vulnerabilities in the security stack (firewalls, SASE components) layered on top.

The Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN) is a SCION-powered network launched by the Swiss National Bank and SIX that connects over 300 participants in the Swiss financial center. It provides the connectivity layer for the SIC interbank payment system, which processes approximately 220 billion CHF and 2.6 million transactions daily. The SSFN replaced the 20-year-old Finance IPNet in 2024, with Anapaya providing the commercial SCION implementation.

The Secure Swiss Utility Network (SSUN) is a SCION-based network connecting energy and utility companies in Switzerland. Launched in August 2025, it is led by the Association of Swiss Electricity Companies (VSE) and supported by Anapaya, AXPO Systems, and multiple Swiss ISPs. The SSUN enables secure data exchange for decentralized energy production, grid management, and regulatory compliance.

A supply chain attack targets an organization indirectly by compromising a trusted third-party vendor, software provider, or service partner. Rather than attacking the target directly, the attacker infiltrates the supply chain to gain access to the target’s network or data. The SolarWinds breach (2020) is one of the most well-known examples, estimated to have cost over USD 100 billion in recovery across affected organizations.

A trust root configuration (TRC) is the policy document that governs an isolation domain (ISD) in the SCION architecture. The TRC gives legitimacy to the Certificate Authorities of the Control Plane PKI to issue certificates to each AS in the ISD. These are fundamentally required to cryptographically verify all SCION Control Plane messages. In simpler terms, the TRC builds the basis for operators and users to establish and manage their own trust criteria and choose with whom to send, receive and transit traffic.

Vendor lock-in occurs when an organization becomes dependent on a single technology provider, creating a concentration risk where its business continuity is tied to the provider’s ability to operate without disruption. In enterprise networking, MPLS typically creates strong vendor lock-in because the entire WAN depends on one carrier’s infrastructure. SCION’s multi-provider architecture eliminates vendor lock-in by enabling organizations to use multiple ISPs simultaneously, with sub-second failover between them.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) creates an encrypted tunnel between two points over a public network, protecting data in transit from interception. VPNs are widely used for remote access and site-to-site connectivity. However, VPNs encrypt traffic at the application layer and still rely on the public Internet for transport, meaning they are subject to BGP hijacking, DDoS attacks, and zero-day vulnerabilities in VPN appliances themselves.

A Wide Area Network (WAN) connects geographically distributed locations (offices, data centers, cloud environments, partners) into a single network. Enterprise WANs have traditionally been built on MPLS, leased lines, or VPN-over-Internet architectures. Modern WAN architectures increasingly use SD-WAN or SCION Secure Access Groups to achieve lower cost, higher resilience, and stronger security than legacy approaches.

A zero-day attack exploits a software vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor and for which no patch exists. The term “zero-day” refers to the fact that developers have had zero days to fix the vulnerability. Zero-day attacks are particularly dangerous because traditional security tools cannot detect them. AI is accelerating zero-day exploitation, compressing the window from vulnerability discovery to active attack from months to days.