SCION-Based Secure Internet Connectivity for Critical Networks

Anapaya Systems builds enterprise connectivity products on SCION, a path-aware Internet architecture designed to replace the implicit trust assumptions of BGP routing. The Zurich-based company was founded in 2017 by Adrian Perrig, David Basin, Peter Müller and Samuel Hitz as a spin-off of ETH Zürich, where SCION research began in 2012. Its customers are organisations that cannot tolerate routing failure or interception: banks and payment networks, utilities and energy operators, healthcare providers, and government and defence agencies.

The architecture groups autonomous systems into isolation domains, each governed by its own certificates and trust roots, so routing paths are cryptographically authenticated rather than accepted on announcement. Senders choose the exact route their packets take and can run several paths at once, with near-instant failover between them. Three products carry this into production: EDGE terminates a customer network onto SCION across WAN and LAN interfaces, GATE fronts services so they are reachable only over chosen paths, and CONSOLE handles management.

Differentiation rests less on features than on the substrate. Services published only to named SCION paths are absent from public Internet scanning, which removes much of the DDoS and intrusion exposure that perimeter tooling otherwise has to absorb, and it positions the offering as an alternative to MPLS, SD-WAN and VPN for enterprise WAN. Distribution runs largely through carriers such as Swisscom and Sunrise, with a CORE product for providers themselves; Switzerland reached full SCION coverage in 2023.