The world wide web is a mystery. It is full with badness, trojan, worms, pornography and faqs on how to build bombs. Especially last keeps the government around the world under the pressure of acting. If you hear politicians speaking about security, they tell you that the internet is a dangerous place and needs to be controlled. But here comes the one million dollar question: How can you controll a decentralized world wide medium like “the net”?
Politicians will tell you that the easiest way is to make people dont accessing such information like the above mentioned. But this is exactly the problem… Everyone who is aware of the technical background knows, that you cant easily just block a site by setting up some kind of proxy.
Lets take a look at the options such a proxy might have. It can analyze the traffic for IP addresses, URI / URL or keywords with a white/blacklist. If found, it can do several actions to keep people away from the blacklisted ressource.
By taking a deeper look at the options, blacklisting IP addresses is useless. First, chance is high to block traffic to allowed sites by blacklisting IP addresses. This is because most internet companies hosts their sites on the same IP. Second, the workaround for the blocked site is to switch to a different hoster (one that is not blacklisted).
Blocking traffic on a URI basis is useless too. Most of the above mentioned sites are accessible by more than one address. Of course you can try to block any domain pointing to the site but redirecting a URI to a different site is not a big issue. And of course, the site owner can aquire more domains.
Searching for specific phrases in URI or within a website is another useless options because chances are high for a false-positive.
Because of the nature of the internet, any censorship provokes a mirror. Google and other companies mirror sites and make them accessible by a huge search index.
Another problem: what if the unwanted information is within a word document which is linked within a webpage with a name that promises something totally different? To block this, the proxy must understand the binary word document format.
What if the information is hided within a crypted archive file? What if the doccument extension was renamed from doc to jpg to hide this information? You can not just blacklist all the evil, therefore the internet is too large.
We have to accept the fact that proxies make us not a bit safer. Because they only serve a small community - users who are not behind can access the information anyhow.
As you might guess, a proxy is not the answer to security.
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