It should be no secret that Sui and its ecosystem are on fire. There’s also a lot happening at the back end and technical side of Sui. For example, we already saw the introduction of Mysticeti on the mainnet. That’s an upgrade to their consensus mechanism. Transactions are now almost instant. Or how about their zkLogin feature? Walrus is also on the horizon; this is a storage system. The newest integration is with SCION. This improves routing in today’s Internet.

So, time to take a closer look at Sui’s integration of SCION.

How Does the Current Internet Work?

Before discussing SCION, it’s important to understand how the current Internet works. So, the current Internet has plenty of ASes or Autonomous Systems. There are thousands of them. In turn, there are various large organization that manage these ASes. For example,

  • ISPs or Internet Service Providers. These offer Internet related services.
  • Enterprises. 
  • Government entities. 
  • Universities.

Any request over the Internet gets routed to a destination server. Let’s take a transaction on Sui as a sample. This transaction gets delivered to an RPC node or Remote Procedure Call node. These are like computer servers. They convert blockchain data into readable messages. They can also send transactions to various networks. 

So, to route this traffic, it uses a BGP or Border Gateway Protocol. Now, Internet data travels in packets. However, there’s no clear routing in place. The packet only knows its destination IP. The packets get from their originating point to the destination point by making several stops. These are also called ‘hops’. 

So, now a packet can start its journey. At the first hop, it gets directed to the next hop. However, the next hop is not necessarily the fastest route. If you end up in a congested route, there’s no other solution, since your packet is not aware of a faster route. The packet is stuck until the congestion eases. It’s like being in a car stuck in traffic because there is an accident ahead that you can’t move past.

What Is SCION, and How Does It Work?

SCION stands for Scalability, Control, and Isolation On Next-Generation Networks. That’s quite a handful. You can see this protocol as an architecture for the future Internet. Since 2009, researchers at ETH Zurich, a public university, have been working on it. Prof. Adrian Perrig leads this research.

SCION

Source: SCION website

SCION has solutions for the issues mentioned above. For instance, it also optimizes network latency, reliability, and security. So, to do this, it reorganizes the ASes into ISDs or isolation domains. These are groups of AS operators. They follow security rules and performance policies. This results in optimized traffic routing. All within their individual networks.

SCION doesn’t use the routing by hops. Instead, it uses “path-aware networking”. Clients can now set out a predefined route. So, you can send a packet via the most optimized and fastest route. It even offers backup routes. The packet knows now at the start of its journey which route it will take. There’s no need for hops anymore where they get their next destination. Even if there’s congestion, there’s an alternative route in place. With thanks to Brian at Prime Machin for an easy interpretation of SCION and Sui.

Why Is Sui Integrating SCION?

Sui is integrating SCION for various reasons. One of the main reasons is to protect its validators from a variety of attacks. For example, DDOS attacks or rerouting. These can cause significant downtime for networks.  With SCION in place, validators can continue their consensus during an attack. Whenever either SCION or the Internet works, the nodes can keep communicating.

Rerouting is redirecting traffic to a different IP address. A sample of this happened in 2018. The attackers rerouted DNS (Domain Name Service) traffic. They managed to get their hands on $17 million worth of $ETH.

Conclusion

Sui is integrating SCION into their layer 1 chain. It’s the first layer 1 chain to run SCION. SCION makes data packet routing on the Internet more efficient. This benefits Sui validators and their nodes. It protects them, among others, against DDOS or rerouting attacks. With SCION, the Sui nodes can keep working as long as either SCION or the Internet is working. This prevents network downtime.

Disclaimer

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