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Comment by commandersaki | Hacker News Reader

I think the test for BGP is Safe is when we stop using it and instead use SCION: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCION_(Internet_architecture).

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SCION is generally considered snake oil within the network operator community. Its weird single vendor for profit company that ships it's software, the fact that no router hw asic fwding supports what they want to do and then the general scummy inclusion of block chain / crypto as well as some "green washing" for PR hype.

Sure the swiss have their toy but no one is taking it seriously.

Hmm, I'd disagree. The fact that Anapaya Systems (the for profit company mentioned) has the only commercial implementation/adjacent software is a problem, yes. But "snake oil" doesn't quite match up with the fact that SCION right now provides the backbone for the Swiss financial network moving 200 billion CHF each day [1], so at least some level of workable technology has to be there. And for no one to be taking it seriously, there's a decently long list of multinational ISPs at the very least taking steps towards offering SCION to customers [2] (e.g. British Telecom has expressed enough interest that they have various recent marketing videos on Anapaya's YouTube channel). Finally, I'm not sure what you mean regarding the "scummy inclusion of block chain / crypto" - as someone who has worked on SCION-based projects I never heard anything about this. Apparently a blockchain company invested in Anapaya, but that doesn't really change anything about the protocol itself, does it?

[1] https://www.scion.org/ssfn-scion/ [2] https://www.scion.org/isps/

200billion CHF....how big is that in bandwidth?

2.6 million transactions per day [0], which in ISO 20022 XML format messages works out to (rough guess) 20GB per day for an average of 1.8Mbps...

[0]: https://www.scion.org/ssfn-scion/

So ... nothing. At least in comparison.

I don't think the swiss banking network is really the right thing to point to. Folks measure networks in bps/pps, not financial transactions - nevermind the actual control plane bits (num of prefixes, as paths, etc.). Plus it's all within one country where you have the luxury of being able to directly influence and steer those companies into adopting this.

As for BT - they're just one broadband ISP operating primarily in a single country. I don't see that moving the needle - you're missing CDNs, traditional large scale "tier 1s" and cloud or large hosting networks.

RPKI got to where it is today through community engagement by folks like Job S. and others - hitting the conferences, direct engagement with operators and raising the bar from a software quality and standards perspective - which still continues today. That's how you get the internet to adopt something that is considered the new normal.

As for your ISP list - I know there are networks listed there that aren't running scion in a production capacity (perhaps you can run scion in a virtualized environment on top of them which is different than those companies running it on their production network).

As for the block chain - it was all the Sui stuff.

> SCION right now provides the backbone for the Swiss financial network moving 200 billion CHF each day

This is a meaningless benchmark - for a small group of trusted big enterprises with insurance policies and mutually signed contracts you could've just as well used OSPF with zero filters.

The benchmark would be adoption by an actual large number of parties that don't/can't talk to eachother spread across the world. With a large chunk of them being malicious or incompetent to the point of being effectively malicious.

I'm not claiming that this shows SCION can replace the respective parts of the network stack right now, and you're right that at a global scale this is still an unproven technology. But I would argue that a technology needs a certain level of matureness / is not "snake oil" if it is deployed in a heavily regulated and comparatively conservative sector such as banking.

Aren't heavily regulated sectors the one where you usually encounter snake oil? Useless WAFs and other security snake oil products, Microsoft 'collaboration' jank like Teams and Sharepoint, MitM proxies, etc?

Why does a routing protocol matter for the banking sector? With proper encryption the route the packets of transaction data takes should not matter at all.

I gotta say some of the proposed use cases are things no one is looking/asking for. One I recall was having a network decide to reach another network by avoiding countries that aren't carbon neutral (which could take longer hops and use more infra / more energy...) feels like they're trying to say they're the green/environmental friendly protocol.

IIRC, UBS used to use IRC (yes, that IRC) as a messaging "backbone", so I'm not sure this really counts as a POC.

When we abandon prefix routing based on I-told-you-so and start using Yggdrasil (https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/) we're safe.

Why hasn't this happened?

Because SCION is mostly said as a joke in the more serious carrier world.

SCION is practically speaking proprietary, and has 1 and maybe a half implementations. I have a laundry list of real problems with SCION but SCION feels like one of those entities that would get quite legal-ey if discussed publicly.

Because BGP works, is understood, and has been debugged by thousands of people and billions of sessions between dozens or hundreds of implementations.

So the benefit of changing out all that infrastucture needs to be much higher than the cost.

You are right. And it'd be absolutely irresponsible to expect _everybody_ to drop things on the floor and adopt a new protocol (implementation) over night.

However, it'd be equally irresponsible to ask for an innovation budget of 0 percent. The reason one bothers with new approaches is, of course, that fixing things on a conceptual level prevents many of the debugging sessions that you had to go through with the old approach. Why QUIC if there is TCP/TLS/HTTP?

IPv4 and NAT are literally _everywhere_. It's tested and well-understood (one would think). But—and that's just my opinion—I sure hope that, one day, we will not have to deal with that mess no more ...

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