SafeSquid

SafeSquid is content-control software: software designed to control which websites users can access. It also provides caching, virus scanning, usage monitoring, bandwidth control, authentication, and other features. SafeSquid is mainly used by schools, businesses, and value-added ISPs.

Cost

SafeSquid is commercial software, but it is offered at zero cost to networks that have less than 20 users.

Features

Web interface

SafeSquid provides a web interface to make it easier for system administrators to configure it.

Profiles

SafeSquid's "Profiles" feature lets administrators group users into groups and set different filtering settings for different groups.

Additional filtering

SafeSquid allows blocking of certain MIME types (file types, such as audio, video, or Flash). It allows the use of regular expressions to modify the contents of web pages before they are displayed. For example, this filtering can be used to remove Javascript and ActiveX content from untrustworthy websites before serving a page to users. It is possible to configure SafeSquid to hide online ads and banners to save bandwidth and reduce distractions.

SafeSquid also can used to block [...] pictures. It analyzes the graphical content like skin tone, contour, etc. to identify a pornographic image. It is a commercially distributed add-on plug-in and can be used with SafeSquid to block pornographic images. Although it is AbOUT 85%-90% accurate, it acts as a good deterrent.

Security

SafeSquid can be used to protect against viruses, worms, spyware and other malware. SafeSquid features Clients for AntiVirus Daemons like Clam, F-Prot, Sophos, Kaspersky and Avast. It supports the Internet Content Adaptation Protocol standard which is commonly used for connecting web filters with security software.

Cache

SafeSquid saves temporary cached copies of frequently visited websites to help save bandwidth and enhance access speed to those sites. SafeSquid can also share cache content with other caching proxy servers, using Internet Cache Protocol and Cache Array Routing Protocol. It can forward requests through any other proxy, SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 firewall.

Authentication

SafeSquid is PAM-aware, and allows users to be authenticated from external servers like Active Directory, LDAP, RADIUS, or MySQL. Administrators can also define user accounts manually using SafeSquid's web interface.

Monitoring

SafeSquid generates log files. Log analyzers like Sawmill and Webalizer can parse the logs and generate log analysis reports for user monitoring.

Technical details

SafeSquid acts as a content filtering web proxy. It does its job using blacklists which list forbidden sites.