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/
-
Build the
scion-skip
binary by runningmake 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
.
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
.
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.