The Internet was built in simpler, more innocent times and was used by a curious mix of visionaries, educators, scholars, and technology experts as a way to democratize the distribution of information.
Decades later, the protocols that govern it interconnected netAlthough the work of private networks will remain largely the same, the composition of Internet residents in 2024 has changed significantly.
Now, the underlying communications protocols on which the Internet operates are the means by which malicious actors seek to extort, steal, ransom, and exploit Internet users.
Financial data from around the world is mixed with medically sensitive information, footage from billions of CCTV cameras, and celebrity gossip. Among this group, teams of highly skilled technicians, whom we call hackers, target vulnerable targets who are ill-equipped to combat the clever and cutting-edge compromise methods that systems face every day, preying on easily exploitable targets.
Although technologies exist to encrypt Internet traffic in general (e.g. SSL-based encryption technologies), https It is still transmitted via the same technology in the form of protocols established deep in Internet history (used to obfuscate web traffic), especially VPNs set up on specific hosts between secure endpoints. These protocols are designed to be swarmable, so business-critical data or personal financial information travels across the Internet in the same way as other protocols.
This issue means that while the payload may be relatively secure, the means of directing or routing traffic can still be exploited. This situation was the basis of a study conducted by Swiss scholar Adrian Perrig. He devised the SCION architecture at the renowned ETH Zurich as a way to determine secure and resilient traffic routing. Without getting too deep into the technical weeds, the SCION architecture allows users to specify routes between privately owned destinations and send data between them independently of the rest of the Internet.
The professor’s work has been so successful that the Swiss Interbank Clearing System, the heart and brain of the Swiss banking system, runs entirely on the SCION network, ensuring the most important reliability and security.
Anapaya is the commercial outcome of the SCION research project, bringing SCION technology to the open market. Available as physical or virtual devices, the product mediates and routes sensitive information between predefined nodes, allowing participating networks to exchange information in a predetermined pattern by establishing hosts, waypoints, traffic types, and possible destinations as directed by the operator. It uses a broad and granular set of rules that allow you to: .
speaking exclusively cloud computing newsMartin Bosshardt, CEO of Anapaya, said in his ‘elevator pitch’ for the SCION network: “The SCION protocol ensures that your Internet service is routable (and) you can grant access to your network only to authorized users. This can make you invisible or non-existent to bad actors. Let’s say you have a software-defined network (SDN) consisting of 50 locations. These 50 locations can share routing information exclusively with each other. To anyone else on the Internet, these 50 locations do not exist. Anyone who doesn’t own the routing information for your service has no way of routing or accessing it because they don’t know it exists.”
For the average person working in cybersecurity, it may seem like overkill for an organization to effectively upgrade some of the most sensitive parts of its infrastructure. But Martin did provide some context on how important it is to transact, exchange information, and use networked devices globally. This is most evident in simple financial terms, he said.
“It would be important to quote an exact figure ($238 billion in 2024) because the entire network security market has become a huge industry. However, the current network security market appears to be larger than the cancer treatment market ($223 billion in 2024). Cancer is perhaps the scariest and most fundamental concern for humanity. But the industry that protects us on the Internet has only gotten bigger. So we really need to fix this problem. Unlike cancer, the Internet is man-made. We understand exactly how the Internet works and why it has become such a dangerous place. “Making the Internet a secure and reliable network is relatively simple.”
Considering the need for a secure network, some companies protect themselves by taking special measures, such as replacing their network infrastructure from scratch with physical replacements of standard Internet devices and investing in MPLS connections (rented, dedicated lines).
“Choose a single supplier. Because if you build your own cabling or have your own infrastructure, you can create an isolated and secure situation. However, it is often not possible to bring your own cable to every institution you want to connect to. And then comes the superpower of the Internet. Critical services that run over the Internet do not choose the Internet as their preferred network. They choose the Internet because there is no alternative.
“You always have to rely on layer 5 features (of the OSI layer) to make your Internet connection private. Right? By default, it trusts the Internet’s routing protocols and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and creates privacy at the content, not the routing level. The moment you are connected to the internet, you have no control over the routing aspect. Isolation is achieved through encryption. However, encryption does not insulate the service from malicious actors. It’s just a matter of making sure you can control the content.”
This is where Anapaya steps in. “The SCION protocol allows us to control routing. We decide and design policies according to the service. You can control who has routable access to your services. “Enforce geographic boundaries or limit connectivity to specific markets and network groups.”
SCION-based networks provide the ultimate combination of the security we primarily know from closed, private networks and the flexibility and resilience of open cross-domain networks, such as the Internet. What makes SCION attractive is that it requires no new infrastructure, new cables or routers. SCION is simply a ‘chip tweak’ to the Internet’s existing infrastructure to provide a global network best suited to today’s needs.
To learn more about the implementation options offered by SCION and Anapaya, the company will appear at TechEx Europe’s Cybersecurity and Cloud track in Amsterdam on October 1 and 2, 2024. If you can’t visit in person, visit the Anapaya website, read the documentation, or contact a networking and security expert to schedule a demo.
Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars from TechForge here.
