Who Invented It?

SCION was developed at ETH Zurich, the most renowned university in continental Europe, where it has been in productive use in research and teaching since 2021. The Swiss National Bank and SIX use it for all system-critical and business-critical infrastructure services of the financial center, including communication via the Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN) to the Swiss payment system SIC. SCION is also used in the healthcare sector to exchange data securely and efficiently. The technology is a key component of the Federal Administration’s cloud strategy, as it is integrated into contracts with leading global public cloud providers such as Amazon, Alibaba, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.

The recipe for secure data exchange is also attracting interest outside of Switzerland. The French cloud connectivity company InterCloud offers SCION-based services, including access to the SSFN. Its customers include a US blockchain data service provider for open banking, whose cloud environments in Europe and the US are connected to Anapaya’s SCION-based network software. Telindus, a Luxembourg-based ICT and telecommunications solutions company, also plans to use SCION to gradually enhance the cybersecurity of its networks in the Benelux countries. It intends to join SSFN and is preparing a feasibility study for its first service. Furthermore, several international carriers are in the process of joining the SCION network.

In addition to practical suitability, another milestone is on the horizon: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which is responsible for the international standardization of the internet, is currently examining the formalization of SCION at the level of interoperability with the existing internet.

However, the theoretical potential is far from exhausted. For instance, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh is developing secure Web3 applications based on SCION to address the numerous vulnerabilities on the internet. A 2022 US study found that approximately 36% of companies worldwide still use the FTP protocol, which is vulnerable to cyberattacks. As such, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to create a secure internet.

Gabriel Juri
SIX