SKIP secures the network at the IP packet level. Any networked application gains the benefits of encryption, without requiring modification. SKIP is unique in that an Internet host can send an encrypted packet to another host without requiring a prior message exchange to set up a secure channel. SKIP is particularly well-suited to IP networks, as both are stateless protocols. Some of the advantages of SKIP include:

• No connection setup overhead
• High availability - encryption gateways that fail can reboot and resume decrypting packets instantly, without having to renegotiate (potentially thousands) of existing connections
• Allows uni-directional IP (for example, IP broadcast via satellite or cable)
• Scalable multicast key distribution
• SKIP gateways can be configured in parallel to perform instant-failover

Latest SKIP News

• (7/2/98) Schemes to support Secure Multicasting were presented at WET ICE'98. Check out the 'Technical Papers' section below.
• (2/16/98) Sun Tries to SKIP the Competition, PC Week Online
• (12/1/97) Unix Review article on SKIP Encryption.
• (9/21/97) SunScreen EFS and SKIP won a Tester's Choice award from Data Communications. 
• (7/22/97) SunScreen SKIP for Windows 95 client is available for download.
• (6/10/97) SunWorld Feature article: SKIP Your Way to Security

  "How does Sun's Simple Key Management for IP provide 3 levels of network security? We show you how to install SKIP and build an encrypted channel between Solaris hosts."

• (5/19/97) Elvis+ Makes Sun's Advanced Security Protocol Available for First Time in Overseas Markets
• (1/31/97) RSA's second round of multi-vendor interoperability testing has finished. Nine unique SKIP implementations interoperated. Download the postscript result matrix.

  "The S/WAN interoperability testing represents a valuable service for customers who want to know what's really going on with interoperable key management and encryption products. SKIP was designed with real world ease of implementation in mind, and Sun is extremely pleased to see this bourne out with the number of vendors supplying a solution."

  SKIP is the most widely implemented IP security protocol.
• (8/30/96) Sun's Internet Commerce Group is now shipping SKIP for Solaris
• (6/20/96) Interoperability Report from the SKIP Developer's Workshop

Source and Binaries

• SunScreen SKIP 3.0 for Windows 95 and NT is available for purchase on-line and downloadable eletronically.
• SunScreen SKIP 1.1.1 for Solaris is available for download. This is exportable-grade IP encryption software for Sparc and x86 platforms.
• Source and binaries for SKIP SKIP Source Release 1.0 , for FreeBSD and SunOS X509 Certificate Library Source

Technical Papers

• Design and Implementation of SKIP (postscript)
• SKIP Applicability Notes
  • Devices expected to handle many simultaneous new secure channels
  • Computationally constrained low-end devices
  • Redundant high availability configurations
  • High-speed networks
  • Secure network management
• SKIP - Securing the Internet (postscript)
  • Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Enabling Technologies, (WET ICE '96), IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996.
• Efficient Security for Large and Dynamic Multicast Groups (also available as postscript, and here are the slides)
  • Multicasting and SKIP? Efficient key changes even for large groups with frequently chaning members? Yes, SKIP can do it. Did you ever wonder how SKIP could deal with this, and still do automatic key management? Here is a possible answer. Published in the Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Enabling Technologies, (WET ICE '98), IEEE Computer Society Press, 1998.
• Power Point slides from Inet '95

SKIP Technical Specifications

• (11/26/97) Specification History
• (4/10/98) SKIP Assigned Numbers
• (4/24/97) Simple Key-Management for Internet Protocols (SKIP)
• (4/24/97) Certificate Discovery Protocol (CDP)
• (4/24/97) SKIP Extension for Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS)
• SKIP Extensions for IP Multicast
• SKIP Algorithm Discovery Protocol
• Encoding of an Unsigned Diffie-Hellman
• X.509 Encoding of Diffie-Hellman Public Values
• Firewall Support for Mobile IP
• Stream cipher Transform for ESP

Companies involved in SKIP interoperability testing

• Internet Dynamics, Inc.
• Novell, Inc.
• OpenROUTE
• Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
• Elvis+
• CheckPoint
• Toshiba Corp
• VPNet
• IRE
• Fortress Networks, Inc.

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