A More Secure Internet: Inspired by Ansel Adams – A Podcast on the Improvement of the Status Quo

A More Secure Internet: Inspired by Ansel Adams – A Podcast on the Improvement of the Status Quo

25 May 2022 20 minutes

Adrian Perrig, professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), wants to use SCION technology to improve the internet. Listen to our podcast to find out how landscape photographer Ansel Adams, of all people, was his inspiration.

Who was Ansel Adams?

Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist. He is famed for the clarity and depth of his black-and-white images. He achieved the unique expression found in these photographs through deep technical understanding of all the production steps involved in film-based photography: lighting, developing negatives, and printing.

Adams wrote books on each of these processing steps, volumes that Adrian Perrig devoured as a teen. Now a professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, Perrig was impressed by the results Adams achieved, and just as impressed with his systematic approach to his work. He nearly became a professional photographer as well, but decided on a career in IT. That decision could turn out to have been a very positive one for all of us. In the latest edition of our podcast Perrig explains how he is set to make the internet more secure and efficient with SCION. Precisely like Ansel Adams, he is introducing innovations to a field thought to have been fully exhausted.

How Secure Can the Internet Be?

SCION stands for Scalability, Control, and Isolation on Next-Generation Networks. The technology makes it possible to define the path by which data travels from the sender to recipient over the internet. That makes the internet safer, faster, and eco-friendlier. Moreover, if a network provider goes down, the problem is bypassed within seconds. SCION internet architecture was developed at the ETH Zurich, and available through Anapaya Systems.

The Swiss National Bank and SIX rolled out the Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN) based on SCION at the end of November 2021. This will further increase the Swiss financial center’s resistance to cyber threats. Segregated from the internet, the SSFN is a monitored and protected network that allows authorized participants operating in the Swiss financial industry to communicate securely with each other, and with financial market infrastructures such as the SIC payment transaction settlement system run by SIX. The SSFN runs in parallel with the existing communications network of SIX, which is very secure in its own right.

Listen to the Latest Episode

In our “Inspired by” podcast series experts from SIX and other representatives of the financial center tell host Hannah Wise about their inspirations. Never miss an episode by subscribing to our podcast via Spotify, Apple or Google.

Explore Related Articles

Discover More