Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol

The Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol (SCIP) is a multinational standard for secure voice and data communication. SCIP derived from the US Government Future Narrowband Digital Terminal (FNBDT) project after the US offered to share details of FNBDT with other nations in 2003. SCIP supports a number of different modes, including national and multinational modes which employ different cryptography. Many nations and industries develop SCIP devices to support the multinational and national modes of SCIP.

SCIP has to operate over the wide variety of communications systems, including commercial land line telephone, military radios, communication satellites, Voice over IP and the several different cellular telephone standards. Therefore it was designed to make no assumptions about the underlying channel other than a minimum bandwidth of 2400 Hz. It is similar to a dial-up modem in that once a connection is made, two SCIP phones first negotiate the parameters they need and then communicate in the best way possible.