Modern Blockchains and Next-Generation Internet Architectures, Markus Legner (Mysten Labs)

Talk by Markus Legner (Mysten Labs)
Abstract:
As globally distributed systems, blockchains fundamentally rely on an available network infrastructure. Unfortunately, today’s Internet is vulnerable to a large number of attacks that may render it unavailable. On the other hand, centralized solutions offered by companies like Cloudflare contradict the decentralization promise of blockchains. Ideally, a blockchain could rely on a public and distributed network infrastructure that is resilient against attacks and provides strong availability guarantees.
SCION is a next-generation Internet architecture developed at ETH Zurich that is seeing increasing global deployment. Besides its built-in security mechanisms, it has another unique feature: As SCION packets carry forwarding information in their packet headers, it offers the opportunity to coordinate some of that forwarding information through an out-of-band mechanism-for example through a blockchain.
In my presentation, I will discuss these synergies between modern blockchains and next-generation Internet architectures, and report on some concrete work on achieving these for the Sui blockchain developed at Mysten Labs and SCION.