The low-frequency part of the SKA, to be built in Australia, will have an extremely high antenna
density of roughly 60,000 antennas within one square kilometer, and is the perfect site for highresolution
studies of air showers. Individual showers will be observed with thousands of antennas
simultaneously. The depth of shower maximum Xmax can be reconstructed with a resolution of
10 g/cm$^2$ using methods currently used by LOFAR and the Pierre Auger Observatory. However,
the high-resolution SKA data allows the development of new methods that can reconstruct more
features of the longitudinal development of air showers, such as the shower length or doublebump
profiles. This allows new constraints on both the mass composition and hadronic shower
physics. Here we discuss the status of the SKA cosmic-ray program and simulation studies of its
capabilities.