SQUASH: DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A LARGE SCALE HTTP GATEWAY AND MASQUERADER

Information available on the web can be divided in two main categories. The first category is those information distributed among different websites and servers. The second category is the information gathered in central information databases (infobases) which contain a huge amount of information and are available and searchable through the website representing the infobase. Infobase owners sell information to the users on per request basis, or to larger groups, based on the number of needed resources. Authentication is done in one of two ways, or both of them: username/password and IPbased. The first approach has so many practicial problems so, in this paper a new approach has been proposed based on central system as an access-point and gateway for users to receive and retrieve their information using Squash technology. The architecture and advantages of this novel method have been discussed and the way of implementation has been described.