SafeSquid: Content Filtering Internet Proxy

SafeSquid, is a Content Filtering Internet Proxy. Generically it can be classified as HTTP/1.1 Proxy. SafeSquid is used to provide Internet access across networks.

SafeSquid provides a Browser Based GUI, for the technicians to provide PCRE based logic, and thus configure SafeSquid to deal with situations. The overall set of logic differs, depending upon the application scenarios, like ISPs that provide Public Internet Access, Business Corporations that provide Internet access to their employees for business use, Schools and educational institutions that provide students Internet access for learning and academic research.

SafeSquid Forums provide the various technicians with assistance and know-how in creating and implementing such logic.

SafeSquid’s wide variety of access and content filters can provide the granular logic for Large Business Corporations to implement their Corporate Internet Access Policies to curb Internet abuse that could lead to legal liabilities, and to contain cyberslacking. SafeSquid can be better used in business enterprises where the security technicians are required to produce compliance reports that clearly depict the pattern of Internet Usage across the enterprise.

Schools and other educational institutions generally use Content Filtering Internet Proxy to prevent young impressionable minds from being accidentally exposed to pervert content that may not be suitable for their age.

SafeSquid has an unconventional multi-threaded architecture that has been primarily designed for use in networks that have extremely large number of users.

SafeSquid is offered at zero cost to networks that have less than 20 users.

Basic Application

SafeSquid is generally deployed, to distribute an authenticated and controlled Internet access to users, and prevent them from visiting unwanted websites. This is basically done by using it’s URL filter feature that allows or blocks access to specific URLs. Access can also be controlled by using cProfiles, or any flat-file URL Blacklist databases, like urlblacklist.com and Shallalist, to restrict access to websites based on content category like porn, adult, webmail, jobsearch, entertainment, etc. These sites maintain a well categorized list of various web-sites and pages. This is an excellent resource for an administrator seeking to granularly enforce a corporate policy that allows or disallows only certain kinds of web-sites to be accessible by specific users, groups or networks.

URL filter can also be used to block ads and banners that appear in web pages, to save bandwidth, or to prevent users from being distracted.

Other uses of SafeSquid

Profiled Internet Access

SafeSquid’s Profiles feature allows creation of granular rules for Internet Access privileges and restrictions. It can be used to create granular filtering policies, by very precisely defining situations. Each situation, thus defined is referred to as a Profile. Each Profile can be defined (or bound) by a programmable set of conditional parameters. Profiles are used as a conditional parameter in almost all of the various filtering sections in SafeSquid. This ensures that filtering action happens exactly, as required.

Advanced Filtering

Many organizations use SafeSquid for it’s advanced filtering features. SafeSquid allows filtering, based on the nature or source of content, with features like Cookie Filter, cProfiles, Header Filter, Keyword Filter and MIME Filter. It allows the use of regular expressions to modify the contents of web pages, files, the client header, and server header in real time. It can be used to remove content like ActiveX, Javascript, etc., from non-trusted websites, before serving the page to users.

Enhanced Security

SafeSquid is popularly used to enhance security against virus, worm, Spyware and other Malware. It can be integrated with third-party, daemon based antivirus software, like ClamAVD, NOD32, Sophie, F-prot, Avast, NOD32 and Kaspersky, to scan all in-coming content, and block malicious content from entering the network.

It has a universal ICAP Client that can connect to any ICAP based security software like DrWeb-ICAP, Symantec Scan Engine, Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Proxy Server and Trend Micro IWSS.

Cache

Another reason for deploying SafeSquid, is for it’s two-tier, manageable, MD5 encrypted, cache. Caches help save bandwidth and enhance surfing speed. SafeSquid can also share cache content with other caching proxy servers, with ICP and CARP. It can also selectively forward requests through other proxy, SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 Firewall.

Authentication

SafeSquid is intrinsically PAM-aware, and allows users to be authenticated from external servers like ADS, LDAP, RADIUS, MySQL, etc. You can also create user accounts from SafeSquid’s Web Interface, by defining usernames and passwords.

Log Reports

SafeSquid generates three log files, in different formats, i.e. SafeSquid Native Log, Access Log and Extended Log. These logs record request details like date, time, remote hostname, username, user IP, requested URL, HTTP status code, content length, etc. Log analyzers like Webalizer, Sarg, Calamaris, etc. can parse the Access Log and generate a detailed, graphical, analysis report. Sawmill Log Analyzer can parse SafeSquid Extended Log [7], and is used to generate a much more detailed analysis report

Reverse Proxy

SafeSquid has a URL redirecting feature, which is mostly used in reverse proxy mode, to load-balance a cluster of web servers.