SCIONLab December 2020

The most important changes to SCION/SCIONLab include:

• Control Plane Public Key Infrastructure now based on x509 certificates instead of the old format based on JSON web signatures.
• Control plane messaging now based on gRPC/protobuf instead of capnproto.
• Packet header redesigned to be more suitable for high speed software or hardware router implementation. See https://scion.docs.anapaya.net/en/latest/protocols/scion-header.html for details.
• Detection of active interfaces now uses the Bidirectional Forwarding Detection protocol (see RFC 5880), instead of custom keep-alive messages between control services.
• New border router implementation with support for the new header and BFD. Note that this does not support peering links yet.
• New SCION-IP gateway (SIG) implementation
• The tools scmp and showpaths are now subcommands of a combined binary with a more polished interface. Usage is e.g. scion ping <isd-as,ip>, scion showpaths <isd-as>, or scion traceroute <isd-as,ip>.
• Log output of the SCION services is captured by the systemd journal, there is no file logging anymore.
• Easier tinkering with the SCIONLab configuration; the important files are now all directly under /etc/scion instead of in deeply nested directories. The scionlab-config utility is more careful to avoid overwriting any changes that a user might have applied.

SCIONLab March 2020

The most important new SCION/SCIONLab features include:

• Control Plane Public Key Infrastructure has been completely refurbished
• Monolithical control service -- Beacon, Path and Certificate service will run as a single, monolithical application
• Communication of applications to the scion daemon over TCP instead of UNIX sockets
• Communications of the scion daemon to the control plane service over TCP instead of SCION/QUIC
• The tools scmp and showpaths as well as the demo applications in scion-apps (bwtester, netcat, sensorapp, bat, ...) no longer require to specify the local address