Next generation filtering: Offline filtering enhanced proxy architecture for web content filtering

Most of available web filters especially parental controls work inline meaning that all outgoing and incoming packets are passed through a filter driver. This approach widely used in parental control applications because they mostly use blacklist, whitelist approach and defense of the applications to bypass the filter easily. Online content filtering along with its own benefits has a big flaw; filtering process affects data transfer throughput. Also this method suffers from being poor to analyze HTTP/HTTPS traffic like html reconstruction, HTML encoding, object analysis, text classifying, image analysis, analyzing HTTPS. Online content filtering is not effective if network traffic is encrypted and cannot be decrypted by the online content filter or more generally, if the traffic is in a form that the online content filter cannot interpret correctly. One of the other disadvantages identified in this work was: packet filter doesnpsilat analyze the contents of a packet; it decides whether to pass it based on the packets addressing information. Accelerating content filtering by only examining Web content is major method used. This architecture proposed in this work use offline filtering and proxy as a synergistic approach. By this way filtering process and data transfer acts independently. This work presents a simple, but effective framework to accelerate the filtering process by examining only part of the Web content. The framework can make the filtering decision, either to block or to pass the Web content. The proposed framework can be used as a gateway, as an agent based content filter or a parental control framework..