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>, orscion 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/scioninstead of in deeply nested directories. The scionlab-config utility is more careful to avoid overwriting any changes that a user might have applied.