SCION in Rust

This library provides an end-host networking stack for SCION and can be used in Rust applications to communicate over a SCION network. The library is fully compatible with the reference implementation written in Go. In terms of functionality, it is a combination of the Go snet and pan libraries. See the section about the repository structure for further details.

In the future, it will be extended to offer QUIC-over-SCION sockets similar to the shttp3 library.

If you observe a bug or want to request a feature, please search for an existing issue on this topic and, if none exists, create a new one. If you would like to contribute code directly (which we highly appreciate), please familiarize yourself with our contributing workflow.

How to use this library

As our crates are not yet published to crates.io, you need to include them as a Git dependency in your Cargo.toml file. Most likely, you will need the scion crate as explained below, but you can also use the scion_proto crate if you only need the main types and no asynchronous communication.

In the [Dependencies] section of your Cargo.toml file, add the following:

scion = { git = "ssh://git@github.com/MystenLabs/scion-rs" }

Optionally, you can specify a tag or branch, for example:

scion = { git = "ssh://git@github.com/MystenLabs/scion-rs", tag = "v0.1.0" }

Further details are provided in this documentation.

Prerequisites

Due to its use of gRPC for communicating with external SCION components, this library requires protobuf to be installed.

For Ubuntu and MacOS, you can use the following snippets to install all prerequisites.

Ubuntu

# Install C/C++ compilers, protobuf, SQLite3, clang
sudo apt install -y build-essential protobuf-compiler libsqlite3-dev llvm-dev libclang-dev clang
# Install Rust
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

MacOS

# Install Homebrew
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
# Install protobuf
brew install protobuf
# Install Rust
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Logging

We use tracing to log messages during program execution. By instantiating an appropriate subscriber in your application, you can control which messages are logged and how.

Repository structure and crates

This codebase consists of three different crates in the crates subdirectory:

1. scion-proto contains the main types and conversions to represent SCION packets, addresses, paths, etc.
2. scion-grpc contains the automatically generated gRPC code to interact with external SCION components like the SCION daemon.
3. scion contains all asynchronous code for sockets, to send and receive packets, to fetch and cache paths, etc.

If you build an application that uses SCION, you will most likely need the scion crate, which includes the others as dependencies.

All crates contain extensive documentation. Please see the following section on how to access it.

Documentation

Most of our code has associated documentation. You can build and access this documentation locally by cloning the repository and using cargo-doc:

git clone https://github.com/MystenLabs/scion-rs
cd scion-rs
cargo doc --workspace --open

Specification and standards

We use the protobuf definitions and other specification from scionproto/scion and the SCION documentation as well as the SCION-related Internet drafts, see draft-dekater-panrg-scion-overview and references therein.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0).