URL filtering

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Artica Tech offer a large database of categorized Web sites, today ( 2021 13 June ) Artica database contains 72 775 295 websites records inside 150 categories such as games, industry, travel, banking…
These records can be used to filter accesses to Internet according to client address, users credentials, Active Directory / LDAP groups, time range…

About The URL filtering

The Web-Filtering service is a dedicated daemon running on your Artica server.
It operates using its own rule engine and regularly downloads filtering databases from Artica Tech (approximately 300 MB of data). The selected databases are then loaded into memory for optimal performance.

For every user request, the proxy service queries the Web-Filtering daemon in real-time to determine whether the requested content should be blocked or allowed to be retrieved from the Internet.
 

Advantages 

• Checking rules are very fast in this method because finding a category from a website is made locally by your Artica server, there is no latency.
• The system rules processing is independent and makes it possible to de-couple the proxy ACLs rules from the web filtering rules.
  This allows a better visibility and a more simplified way to build filtering rules

Disadvantages 

• The Web filtering process consumes more system resources. 
  Depending on the selected categories, the web filtering engine may use up to 3 GB of RAM and fully utilize a CPU core for its operations. For instance, the "Industry and Health" category contains over 5 million records, all of which are loaded into memory.

• The filtering engine requires local downloads of category databases. 
  When Artica Tech updates these databases, your Artica server fetches the changes, which can result in frequent downloads exceeding 150 MB.

• However, the rule engine has limited filtering capabilities. 
  You can only filter traffic based on time ranges, source IP addresses, usernames, and groups (via Active Directory or LDAP).

• Activate the Web-Filtering
  Web filtering installation can be performed through the software center or via the main menu of the filtering service.
   

• The Web-Filtering policies
  Web filtering policies instruct the proxy service whether it should query the web filtering service before processing user requests.

Rules behavior

• The nothing else rule

URL-Filtering rules based on sources:

• Create a web-filtering based on IP addresses