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SSqore categorizes websites by the likely nature of their content. It queries SafeSquid’s Content Categorisation Service (CCS) and adds category names to the connection so Access Profiles and filters can match on them.
SSqore has globals only — no policy list. See Cloud / categorisation feeds for CCS connectivity and offline behaviour.

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Global settings

Open Configure → Application Setup → SSqore. The entire configurable surface is two toggles — Enabled and Heuristic.
SafeSquid console showing SSqore Global settings with Enabled set to TRUE, the Edit Policy icon circled

SSqore — Global settings

  • Enabled — When off, URL categorization is skipped and no CCS categories are added to connections. When on, host names are looked up and categories are merged into the connection profile list for policy matching.
  • Heuristic — Stored in configuration but not read by the current build. Toggling Heuristic does not change URL lookup behaviour today.

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How categorization works

SSqore is the last-resort cloud tier: it runs only if the site is still uncategorized after local Categorize Web-Sites entries and DNS category feeds have already been checked.
  1. During request profiling, SSqore first checks a fast in-memory cache of recently-categorized destinations, then a second, larger on-disk cache of previously-seen results; only on a double miss does it perform a live lookup against CCS for the request host (and referer host where applicable), caching the result for next time.
  2. Returned category names are added to website_categories / connection profiles used by Access Profiles and other sections. The result is always a Category label — SSqore never returns a numeric score, a risk rating, or a confidence percentage. Whatever filtering decision follows is entirely up to how an Access Profiles entry is written to match on that label.
  3. Results are cached under /var/lib/safesquid/ssqore/cache to reduce repeat lookups.
  4. URLs that cannot be categorized may be queued as uncategorized for later retry.
  5. When SSqore is disabled, categorization hooks exit without adding categories.
  6. If the appliance’s subscription has expired, SSqore categorization is skipped for that connection, the same way other subscription-dependent labeling features are gated.
Code quirk — Heuristic unused: The Heuristic global is persisted in config XML but the runtime module does not consult heuristic when calling CCS. Enable/disable behaviour is controlled only by the Enabled switch.

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Using categories in policies

Access Profiles Secondary Policies typically match SSqore category tags (for example block Social Networking). Categories appear as profile strings on the connection after lookup — design profiles to reference the exact category names CCS returns. Custom or local categories may also come from the Categorize Web-Sites tool and DNS category zone settings in startup.ini; SSqore is the cloud lookup path.

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Examples

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1 — Enable cloud categorization

  • Enabled: on
  • Valid subscription and network path to CCS (see feeds documentation)
Result: browsing adds category tags to each connection; Access Profiles can ALLOW or DENY by category.

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2 — Offline appliance

  • Enabled: on
  • No CCS reachability
Result: lookups fail or use cache only; uncategorized hosts may receive Uncategorized Web-Sites or no new categories until connectivity returns.
  • Keep SSqore enabled when Access Profiles depend on cloud categories.
  • Do not rely on Heuristic until wired in code — treat it as a stored placeholder.
  • Monitor subscription and feed status under Support / feeds documentation.

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How to verify

  1. Enable CATEGORY log level; look for SSqoreSection:: and category assignment lines.
  2. Open Detailed logs for a browsed URL; confirm category tags on the connection.
  3. Test an Access Profile that matches a known SSqore category (allow or deny).

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See also