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Application Ecosystem

SafeSquid SWG is a modular, cloud-integrated platform that unifies policy decisions, combines intelligent threat detection with deep content inspection, and supports seamless multi-cloud deployment.

SafeSquid Application Ecosystem overview

Why a Unified Ecosystem?​

The Problem: Enterprises stitching together multiple security appliances inherit:

  • Policy drift across tools
  • Inspection blind spots
  • High operational overhead
  • Inconsistent enforcement

SafeSquid's Solution: A single, modular system that:

  • Scales horizontally: Clustered proxies grow without policy drift
  • Centralizes L7 control: Unified policy engine delivers consistent outcomes
  • Provides audit-ready operations: Built-in reporting/forensics and versioned backups
  • Secures by design: Selective TLS interception, true-MIME validation, and policy-aware DNS

Architectural Planes​

SafeSquid splits responsibilities into planes so each solves a distinct problem without collisions, simplifying scale, upgrades, and audit.

Data Plane​

Challenge: Modern HTTPS hides intent, but blind pass-through misses attacks while heavy inspection adds latency.

Solution: The SafeSquid Proxy Cluster sits in the path and:

  • Validates TLS
  • Decrypts selectively under policy
  • Inspects HTTP semantics
  • Scans content exchanged
  • Enforces security policies

Nodes remain stateless and scale horizontally behind load balancers.

Control Plane​

Challenge: Dozens of proxies with slightly different rules risk "all-or-nothing" pushes that break traffic.

Solution: The Policy Configuration Console becomes the source of truth:

  • Teams author, simulate, review, and approve changes
  • Staged rollouts with RBAC
  • Versioning and diffs make changes auditable and reversible
  • Updates move quickly without surprises

Management Plane​

Challenge: Licenses, activation keys, and certificate lifecycles scatter across tools, slowing operators and creating outages.

Solution: The Self-Service Portal centralizes routine jobs:

  • Activate or renew licenses
  • Manage enterprise root CA and OCSP/CRL settings
  • Enroll connectors
  • Adjust organization settings
  • Role-scoped access and activity history

Observability Plane​

Challenge: Incident response and compliance fail when logs lack context or arrive late.

Solution: Reporting & Forensics streams structured telemetry (JSON/CEF/syslog) with evidence fields:

  • Dashboards show health and policy outcomes in real time
  • Scheduled CSV/PDF reports satisfy audit cycles
  • No manual exports needed

Core Components​

  1. SafeSquid Proxy Cluster
    Central enforcement point for all HTTP/HTTPS traffic, performing full proxying, in-line inspection, and policy enforcement.

  2. Policy Management Console
    Administrative interface for defining, simulating, and enforcing access control, URL filtering, SSL inspection, DLP, and other security policies.

  3. Self-Service Portal
    Web portal for managing cloud-integrated features: activation keys, license management, Root CA certificates.

  4. Reporting & Forensics
    Real-time dashboards, customizable reports, and forensic logging for visibility, compliance, and incident investigation.

  5. Integrated DNS Security
    Hardened internal DNS resolver with policy-aware resolution, blocking of malicious domains, and mitigation of DNS tunneling and spoofing attacks.

  6. Cloud-Based Configuration Backup & Restore
    Cloud-synchronized backup system with version-controlled policy snapshots for seamless restoration and rollback.

  7. Cloud-Based Threat Intelligence Feeds
    Real-time intelligence feeds injected directly into the enforcement pipeline for maximum relevance.

Supporting Services​

For production use, deploy SafeSquid with supporting services for high availability, monitoring, and performance:

  1. Monit
    Monitoring service that ensures zero downtime: auto-restarts processes, cleans temporary files, fetches threat intelligence updates.

  2. BIND
    Local DNS resolver that accelerates lookups by caching and using root DNS servers directly.

  3. NTP
    Time synchronization critical for Active Directory SSO and TLS certificate validation.

Integrations​

Enterprise-Ready Integrations: SafeSquid easily integrates with:

  • IAM systems (Active Directory, LDAP, SAML)
  • ICAP servers (external content scanning)
  • DLP systems (data loss prevention)
  • SIEMs (Splunk, ELK, QRadar)
  • SoC threat intelligence platforms

These integrations allow SafeSquid to blend seamlessly into your existing environment.

Directory Structure​

SafeSquid's directory structure adheres to the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and logically organizes:

  • Service initialization scripts
  • Log management (/var/log/safesquid/)
  • Module loading
  • UI rendering
  • System performance tuning
  • SSL certificates (/usr/local/safesquid/security/)
  • Content filtering modules
  • DLP configuration
  • Caching (/var/db/safesquid/)
  • Analytics

This structure ensures easy maintenance, debugging, and extensibility.

Next Steps​

  1. Configuration Portal — Access the admin interface and configure policies
  2. Supporting Services — Set up Monit, BIND, and NTP for production readiness
  3. SSL Inspection — Enable HTTPS decryption
  4. Authentication — Integrate with Active Directory or LDAP