F15-SC: Yes
Rationale
The selected base SCION router validates hop expiry, ingress and the hop-field MAC before normal forwarding. The pinned implementation also preallocates its packet-buffer pool and finite processor, slow-path and forwarding queues. Queue admission uses nonblocking sends that discard packets and return buffers when the relevant queue is full. Invalid hop MACs enter the bounded slow path rather than normal forwarding. Together these provide path-authority rejection and bounded packet-holding state at the border-router dataplane boundary.
Assessment method
Primary documentation and pinned source review; no runtime experiment
Source context
SCION v0.12.0 dataplane admission, packet pool and processing queues
Outstanding qualification
This closes the earlier documentary gap with explicit pool and queue bounds, not with path validity alone. For I configured interfaces, batch size B, P processors, S slow-path processors and processor queue capacity Q, the pool has 3*I*B+(P+S)*(Q+1) packet buffers of 9000 bytes, plus packet structures and other overhead. These are configured implementation bounds, not a total-process memory ceiling. Parsing, hashing, hop-MAC checking, metrics and possible SCMP response generation still cost CPU; kernel socket queues, control-plane state and logging are outside this bound. Path authority is reusable and does not authenticate an individual sender or authorize the destination application. Valid-path floods can consume all processing capacity. No EPIC, COLIBRI, extra policing, service-floor guarantee or runtime test is credited.
Public sources
Editorial evidence references
The following identifiers refer to research records not included in this public package; they are not public links.
- round543.html
- round543-sources.json