BGP was not designed to be secure. It was designed to work — routing packets between the thousands of autonomous systems that make up the internet, quickly and at scale. For four decades it has done that. It has also, throughout those four decades, been exploited, misconfigured, and abused in ways that were predictable from the start.
The problem with patching BGP
Route hijacks, route leaks, and nation-state interception are not theoretical threats — they are documented, recurring events. Extensions like RPKI, BGPsec, and Route Origin Authorisations help at the margins, but they do not address the underlying issue: BGP has no native way to verify that a network claiming to own a block of addresses actually does.
What SCION does differently
SCION (Scalability, Control, and Isolation On Next-Generation Networks) is an internet routing architecture developed at ETH Zürich. Rather than retrofitting security onto BGP, it replaces the routing foundation entirely. Three mechanisms distinguish it from the current internet.
Multi-path routing. SCION establishes tens or hundreds of parallel paths simultaneously. When one fails, traffic reroutes within milliseconds — below the threshold of human perception.
Isolation domains (ISDs). Countries, regions, or organisations define their own trust roots. A misconfiguration in one domain cannot cascade into another. The ATM outages that rippled from Australia across France and Norway on the current internet would be structurally impossible in SCION.
Cryptographic path validation. Every router along a SCION path provides a cryptographic signature. Packets cannot be silently rerouted through a network that was not part of the agreed path.
Already in production
The Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN), built by SIX Group and the Swiss National Bank, has settled around 220 billion Swiss francs per day on SCION infrastructure since November 2021. The legacy MPLS network it replaced — Finance IPNet — began its formal decommissioning in September 2024. During SSFN testing, a full carrier shutdown went unnoticed by applications; failover measured below one millisecond.
Why adoption is slow
Despite a clean production track record, SCION remains largely confined to Switzerland. Several barriers compound each other: it is not yet an IETF standard; network effects mean nobody wants to be first; a single commercial vendor (Anapaya, an ETH Zürich spin-off) currently provides the only deployable implementation; and infrastructure renewal is psychologically difficult to justify when the existing system is still running. As one practitioner put it — nobody renews a house foundation unless forced to.
What would change the calculation
ISPs in Benelux are now offering SCION connectivity, and some customers are switching providers specifically to get it. Standardisation work is in progress at the IETF. The European digital sovereignty agenda is drawing attention to SCION's isolation-domain model as a way to reduce dependence on foreign routing infrastructure. And, bluntly, a sufficiently serious BGP incident — nation-state traffic interception that takes down national infrastructure — would likely accelerate adoption faster than any standards body.
What this means for network operators
SCION is not yet a practical option for most organisations — but the direction of travel matters. For those evaluating long-term network strategy, particularly in financial services, healthcare, or critical infrastructure, it is worth tracking. The Swiss financial sector spent two years on governance design before going live; organisations that understand the architecture now will be better placed when the deployment window opens.