SCION offers a different approach to route protection, but deployment requires additional infrastructure and support from network operators.
SCION is a network architecture developed at ETH Zurich and used, among other deployments, in Switzerland’s financial infrastructure. It lets the sender select network paths and cryptographically validate path information—capabilities that are not part of base BGP.
The architecture uses cryptographic path validation, trust-domain isolation, and multipath forwarding. When independent paths are available, this can reduce the impact of incorrect announcements and speed up failover.
The Secure Swiss Finance Network, launched by the Swiss National Bank and SIX for financial-sector participants, runs on SCION. According to the project operators, failover after a provider outage usually takes a few seconds and does not interrupt the application session. The general SCION overview cites a typical failover time of 1–2 seconds.
Deploying SCION requires SCION gateways or native support, participating network operators, and operational expertise. The architecture can run alongside the conventional internet and currently complements BGP in selected networks rather than replacing it on the public internet.