skip

README

skip

skip (SCION kludge in prowsers, also "ship" in many languages and so fitting with the lighthouse/beacon scheme ⛵) is a poor man's browser integration for SCION.

skip uses a Proxy auto-config file to forward all requests with a SCION destination to a proxy server running as a (native) binary on localhost. This mechanism does not let us dynamically look up whether a name refers to a SCION address. We identify SCION addresses as either:

• the host name of a SCION host from /etc/hosts or /etc/scion/hosts
• a mangled SCION address in the form <ISD>-<AS id with underscores>-<host>, e.g. http://17-ffaa_0_1101-129.132.121.164/

Installation

• Build the scion-skip binary by running make scion-skip (see Build in the main README).

• Install the skip.pac as an "Automatic proxy configuration".

  In Firefox (currently v84.0), navigate to Preferences / General / Network Settings, enable "Automatic proxy configuration URL" and enter http://localhost:8888/skip.pac. Adapt the address if you're running skip on a non-default address with --bind.

Usage

This requires a running SCION endhost stack, i.e. a running SCION dispatcher and SCION daemon. Please refer to 'Running' in this repository's main README and the SCIONLab tutorials to get started.

Start bin/scion-skip and keep it running in the background.

Enter SCION addresses in the URL bar of your browser, mangled as described above:

• http://17-ffaa_0_1101-129.132.121.164/
• http://www.scionlab.org, assuming there is an entry for www.scionlab.org in /etc/scion/hosts.

Limitations

Obviously this is not great, but hey, it's a start. Some inspiration for how to to build something more advanced can be found in this extensions for the gopher protocol, OverbiteNX.