CommunicationPublished on 28 June 2024

Swiss Team uses SCION to connect to Estonia during Cyber-Defense Exercise

During the Locked Shields 2024 cyber defense exercise in April this year, the Swiss team used the SCION network architecture to connect to the exercise infrastructure in Estonia. The Cyber-Defence Campus, armasuisse S+T, supported the Swiss team in creating the SCION connection.

Andrea Thäler, Cybersecurity and Data Science, armasuisse Science and Technology

A man gives a lecture to several people.

Locked Shields is the world’s largest international live-fire cyber-defense exercise. The exercise is an in-depth technical Red vs Blue exercise designed for practicing response to a cyber crisis according to a realistic pre-defined scenario. The main goal of the scenario is to give the participants a realistic training experience in defending IT-systems under intense cyber-attacks. It is organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCoE) in Tallinn every year.

Each participating nation has to join a «Blue Team» to defend the IT infrastructure of a district of the fictional country of Berylia. This IT infrastructure is virtualized in the cyber range provided by the CCDCoE and is physically located in Estonia, while the participants join from their respective countries and have to connect to the cyber range via a virtual private network (VPN).

Given the current geopolitical situation, it was assessed that there could be a risk of routing attacks (such as BGP hijacking) during the exercise. For this reason, the connection between the Swiss Blue Team (which this year formed a team with Austria and the USA) and Estonia was routed via SCION. SCION is a new Internet architecture designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communication. During Locked Shields, SCION ensured that the traffic from the Swiss Blue Team was routed along a pre-determined path that only passed through trusted Swiss and Estonian Internet Service Providers (ISPs). To maintain confidentiality, a VPN tunnel was also used on top of the connection.

Project SCION - a technical challenge

The SCION infrastructure was configured by the Cyber-Defence Campus, which acted as a bridge between the Swiss Cyber Command acting as the participant with the Blue Team, and the industry partners Anapaya, CybExer and Swisscom. As SCION is still a new technology and there are not yet many ISPs worldwide that support SCION, the project was an interesting technical and organizational challenge. The short-term installation of a SCION connection at the exercise site in the Swiss alps was established on time thanks to the great cooperation among the involved parties. Besides the added security, the connection was stable and provided good throughput, albeit with a slightly longer latency than a direct Internet connection likely due to only a limited number of SCION paths being available between Switzerland and Estonia.

The CYD Campus sees a future in SCION technology

The Cyber-Defence Campus continues to investigate possible use-cases for the SCION technology. At the recent CCDCoE Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon) in Tallinn, Dr. Roland Meier from the Cyber-Defence Campus presented a new architecture that leverages SCION as well as other technologies developed in collaboration with ETH Zurich in order to build secure wide-area networks over the infrastructure of public ISPs.

More information: