Introducing SafeSquid® SWG

The web runs core business workflows —and it’s the dominant attack surface; exposing us to threat vectors like phishing, malware and data theft. Security solutions for mitigating web-based threats are historically as old as the WWW itself.

Endpoint security solutions, like Antivirus and EDR, improves host hygiene, but is bound to the OS and calling process, consumes CPU/bandwidth, scales poorly for granular user/group policy, and propagates changes slowly.

Perimeter Security solutions enable mitigation of threats before they reach an endpoint. Network Layer Firewalls enforce Layer 3/4/5 security policies to prevent unsanctioned connections. Application Layer Firewalls intercepts all HTTP/HTTPS traffic, inspects Layer 7 content to prevent unsanctioned information exchange, even within sanctioned connections. Legacy mitigation leaned on URL/reputation filtering—useful for known malicious websites, but weak against dynamic or unknown destinations. Early generations of perimeter solutions, like UTMs, could thus deliver both - NLF and ALF requirements.

Evolution of Layer 7 Threat Landscape

Today, global surge in web based security breaches underscore the failure of legacy measures, and overhyped “all in one” technologies. The widespread availability of large language models motivates cyber-criminals to orchestrate sophisticated phishing campaigns. The Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) ecosystem has democratized access to sophisticated Ransomware and Botnet services on the dark web, for a very affordable monthly subscription. In addition, the race to excite users with innovative applications has fostered a “Ship Now, Secure Later” culture. A multitude of web developers, inadvertently adopt free software components, exposing visitors to Zero-Day vulnerabilities. The profitability of targeted advertising incentivizes Social Networking and E-commerce giants to innovate privacy-breaching technologies.

Composite Opaque Layer 7 technologies power Web 2.0 Applications

Business workflows now run on composite cloud applications, delivered by a seamless inter-connect of diverse web technologies. Modern Web Applications have rapidly adopted innovative web technologies, like APIs, user-generated content, multi-media streaming, and cross-site integrations. Opaqueness of the underlying Layer 7 technologies makes them also very difficult to comprehend for even an average IT technician, much less anticipate the underlying risks.

Zero-Day Threats Bypass Signature Based Defences

Zero-Hour phishing, ransomware delivery, command-and-control callbacks, and malicious scripts are increasingly disguised within legitimate domains and dynamic web content. Attackers use techniques, like Legacy URL Reputation Evasion (LURE) and Malware Reassembly, to bypass signature-based defences, like URL filters and anti-virus engines. Static signature or reputation checks cannot adapt to polymorphic code or context-aware attacks, leaving enterprises exposed.

Legacy Perimeters Fail to Protect Remote Users

Today’s cloud-first, hybrid work environment has completely disrupted the "Castle and Moat" security model. Enterprise traffic now flows directly to cloud applications, collaboration platforms, and SaaS ecosystems—often bypassing datacentre security controls altogether. Users access corporate data from unmanaged devices, remote locations, and public networks, eliminating clear network boundaries.

Performance Trade-Offs Weaken Security Enforcement

The surge in cloud applications, video streaming, collaboration platforms, and encrypted sessions has multiplied both traffic volume and inspection complexity. Legacy appliances lack elastic scalability, quickly hitting performance ceilings that result in latency, dropped sessions, or reduced inspection depth—directly weakening security effectiveness.

Zero-Trust Web Security

Traditional security models typically grant trust once—at the point of authentication—and retain it for the duration of a session. This model assumes that the identity, device, application, and network context remain secure and unchanged throughout the interaction, which is no longer a safe assumption in today’s dynamic, distributed environments.

Zero Trust redefines trust as a transient, context-dependent attribute that must be continually re-evaluated. Each access request is independently assessed, not just based on credentials, but on the current state of the user, device, network, and application. This mirrors human trust models, where confidence in someone's actions is earned incrementally and can be revoked instantly upon signs of deception or anomaly.

At the Application Layer, this means:

1. Never trust, always verify every web transaction to ensure no content is exhanged unless explicitly authorised.

2. Policy decisions are context-driven, evaluating multiple risk factors—including user identity, client application, destination website, server location, content exchanged, behavioural patterns—ensuring least priviledge access.

3. Adaptive Trust Assement Framework must continuously analyse telemetry and adjusts policy enforcement when anomalies occur.

4. Assume Breach, as compromise is a matter of when, not if. Reactive web security controls must be enforced to contain threats, limit lateral movement, and tightly control egress traffic in the event of an incident.

By transforming trust into a dynamic, situational metric, Zero Trust Web Security allows enterprises to detect and disrupt advanced threats—including insider misuse, credential compromise, and session hijacking—before damage occurs. Every transaction is an opportunity to reassess trust, ensuring that access is always aligned with the current risk.

SafeSquid® Secure Web Gateway

Enterprises with high-security awareness employ solutions distinctively specialized for NLF and ALF technologies. As both technologies present different challenges, engaging technicians specializing in relevant skill sets ensures optimal use of both. Traditional ALF solutions seek to retrofit legacy web caching proxy technologies, like Squid Web Proxy. Inherent limitations thus not only restrict security capabilities but also impact performance when multiple security options are enabled.

To address these shortcomings, SafeSquid® was introduced in 2004 as a purpose-built HTTP Proxy Server, designed specifically for Application Layer security. Unlike legacy proxies, SafeSquid’s architecture was engineered from the ground up to deliver scalable performance, even under heavy inspection loads, while offering deep and granular threat mitigation capabilities across web traffic.

Pioneering solutions to mitigate web-based threats, yet unaddressed by alternatives, highlights SafeSquid's evolution since its maiden release. A dedicated team of security experts and technology specialists ensure its constant evolution and enable you to meet new challenges.

SafeSquid Secure Web Gateway (SWG) is the latest generation in this product family to safeguard internet users and internal web applications. Combined with a proven HTTP Proxy technology, innovative set of security features, and a state-of-the-art implementation architecture, SafeSquid SWG gives you fullest capabilities for gateway-level access control, and deep content security into a unified, highly customizable platform.

1. Anti-Phishing Measures

   • Detect homograph domains to expose domain spoofing and impersonation attempts

   • Proactively sandbox unsanctioned websites to protect users from zero-hour phishing campaigns and unknown threats

2. Malware Defense

   • Block Assembly of Last Mile Malware

   • Neutralise malware threats On-The-Wire

   • Disable traction with Ransomware and Botnet command-and-control centers.

3. Data Leakage Prevention

   • Prevent undesirable egress of confidential data and sensitive information

   • Utilize intelligent content awareness to differentiate legitimate traffic from anomalous exfiltration attempts.

4. Cross-Site Security

   • Safeguard authenticated sessions from hijacking and injection attacks.

   • Protect internal and cloud-hosted assets by enforcing secure web interactions.

5. Productivity Assurance

   • Regulate usage of Web 2.0 Applications to curb cyberslacking

SafeSquid SWG delivers true Zero Trust enforcement at the web gateway—fortifying the intrinsic security quotient of enterprises to defend against Zero-Day web-based threats.

Application Ecosystem

Legacy security solutions often fragment enforcement across multiple appliances, creating policy gaps, inspection blind spots, and administrative overhead. SafeSquid Secure Web Gateway (SWG) consolidates essential web security controls into a unified modular, Application Layer-focused architecture, ensuring granular policy enforcement, seamless integration, and scalable performance.

At a high level, the SafeSquid SWG solution consists of the following core components:

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

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, like creating activation keys, license management, configuring Root CA certificates, etc.

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 in case of failure or misconfiguration.

7. Cloud-Based Threat Intelligence Feeds
   To ensure your organisation’s security posture has maximum relevance, real-time intelligence feeds are directly injected into the enforcement pipeline.

For production use, deploy SafeSquid with Supporting Services for high availability, monitoring and performance enhancement.

Key Capabilities

Built on a modular proxy architecture, SafeSquid SWG is a fully software-based solution offering unmatched flexibility in configuration and deployment—suitable for enterprises, ISPs, critcal infrastructure, educational institutions, and government organizations.

1. Zero-Trust Web Access
   Traditional access models grant broad permissions once a user is authenticated, creating opportunities for lateral movement, shadow IT usage, and accidental or malicious misuse. Instead of binary “allow/deny” decisions, SafeSquid enforces fine-grained, identity-aware, and context-driven rules that continuously validates each web transaction.

2. On-The-Wire Deep Content Inspection
   Conventional security tools introduce latency by writing traffic to disk before scanning, creating performance bottlenecks and opportunities for evasion. SafeSquid SWG performs all HTTPS inspection, content filtering, and threat analysis entirely in memory, enabling real-time enforcement without delays while ensuring that malicious payloads are intercepted before reaching users.

3. Native Browser Isolation
   Malicious scripts within legitimate sites exploit browser vulnerabilities. SafeSquid enforces Content Security Policies (CSP) to natively sandbox web applications inside the browser, isolating risky content and preventing direct compromise of endpoints.

4. Homograph Detection
   Attackers register lookalike domains using homoglyph characters to trick users into visiting spoofed sites. SafeSquid detects these homograph attacks in real time, blocking deceptive domains before they can be used for phishing or credential theft.

5. True MIME type detection
   File extension spoofing enables malicious executables to masquerade as safe documents. SafeSquid validates the true MIME type of more than a hundred file types and thousands of data identifiers, preventing disguised malware and stopping unauthorised data transfers.

6. SMP Aware Architecture
   Traditional gateways fail to utilise modern multi-core systems efficiently, causing performance bottlenecks under heavy load. SafeSquid’s SMP-aware architecture is optimised for symmetric and shared-memory multiprocessing, absorbing load bursts, and scaling up linearly as hardware resources increase and delivering consistent high throughput.

7. Cluster Ready Technology
   Legacy appliances degrade under traffic growth. Proxy nodes can be added seamlessly to the cluster for scale-out, load balancing, and failover.

8. Self-Heal Technology
   SafeSquid’s Self-Heal Technology proactively monitors critical dependencies, automatically regenerating missing, expired, or corrupted configurations and signatures to ensure uninterrupted protection

9. Enterprise Ready
   SafeSquid can easily integrate with your IAM systems, LDAP servers, ICAP servers, DLP systems, SIEMs, and SoC threat intelligence, to easily blend in your environment.

Free Forever!

SafeSquid® SWG is free to download and use. You can deploy On-Premises, Off-Premises (Cloud), or a hybrid Secure Web Gateway for your enterprise within 15 minutes. Detailed guides, articles and configuration examples enables regular IT and Security Technicians to self-start and manage.

Rech out to SafeSquid Labs for friendly hand holding assistance and personalised training to setup, manage and achieve your goals.