Project history
& support
Design of an active sheep-dip originally started in 2009, for internal use by a British company. It was a response to the threat from malicious software on flash drives, therefore SheepDip Workstation was the first system to be developed. More than 20 of these sheep-dips were built in the summer of that year, and deployed to the company's premises all around the United Kingdom. They are still in regular use.
In 2010 a simple central monitoring system was added. This has subsequently evolved into SheepDip Manager.
A secondary purpose of each sheep-dip was to act as a point where files could be transferred in and out of an encryption domain. SheepDip Workstations were given special removable media policy settings to let them perform this function. In 2011 the Network SheepDip was developed to allow file transfers between different encryption domains belonging to the same company, without the inconvenience of using removable media.
In 2012 it was recognised that the software which had evolved over the previous few years should be made more widely available. It was a useful form of protection, not to be found anywhere else, and potentially could help many other security conscious organisations. Since it was not part of its originator's core business, it was decided to release the code under the General Public Licence rather than develop it into a commercial product.
In 2013 the SheepDip Project was established as an independent body, as a precusor to open source publication. As soon as legal rights to the software had been transferred, the code was released under the GPL Version 3 for free download from SourceForge. The original developers continue to be involved and new participants as welcome to join.