Proxy and filtering in the education sector: how can we make the internet safer while protecting children?

In an increasingly connected world where technology is omnipresent, national education plays an essential role in training and preparing younger generations to use and master new digital tools. This has led to the digitization of educational resources and the widespread use of digital workspaces (ENT) to manage communication between schools and families, among other things.

Developing real digital skills in students goes hand in hand with the increasing use of the internet at school, which places a heavy responsibility on the school to protect children from the dangers of the web.

As early as 2009, a study conducted by the association La voix de l'enfant (The Voice of the Child) revealed that 80% of the children surveyed used the internet to do their homework, but also that 87% of them had already come across shocking content while surfing the web. The rapid acceleration in the use of social networks such as Instagram and the exponential consumption of YouTube videos pose serious challenges in terms of filtering internet content in the national education system. While YouTube can help to educate and entertain students, it also contains a great deal of content that is inappropriate for children.

Under these circumstances, how can we preserve an optimal user experience without resorting to excessive and untimely blocking? What specific requirements must be met in the national education system?

The specific characteristics of internet use in national education

Promoting responsible use of the internet and the computer equipment made available to students is undoubtedly one of the priorities in national education. To guarantee this security on the web, schools cannot simply activate the control or protection functions contained in the web browsers of computers or tablets, but must address two main challenges:

• On the one hand, continuously informing and training different internet users: administrative staff, teachers, and of course students, to raise awareness of the dangers of the internet. The ideal approach is to use educational content tailored to each level of audience in order to make information that can sometimes be complicated accessible to a very wide audience.
• On the other hand, setting up a web security gateway that complies with French legislation from a cultural and legal standpoint, capable of managing the surfing habits of these different categories of users and interacting with them via contextualized messages to continuously teach them how to adopt the right reflexes when faced with web threats.

Our extensive experience with national education institutions has led us to integrate numerous features into our web security gateway that address these challenges, such as:

• Management of different user populations in filtering policies: each person among teachers, students, etc. is authenticated and complete traceability of each person's browsing logs is maintained.
• Optimizing bandwidth so that watching YouTube videos, for example, does not interfere with other essential traffic that is necessary for the school's educational activities.
• HTTPS filtering and SSL decryption to control attempts by students to circumvent restrictions, such as entering URLs into Google Translate (accessible via an HTTPS feed) in order to use the translation service to access prohibited websites.

Internet in schools: the essential legal compliance of proxies

The main challenge is also to ensure compliance with French legal and cultural requirements, as well as with the prerogatives of the national education system in terms of content filtering for minors.

It is therefore important to be aware that each country has its own laws and that the age groups for which certain content is authorized in France, other European countries, or the United States vary greatly. The issue of web security gateway sovereignty is therefore essential, as the themes, policies, and filtering categories associated with different user groups and used in schools must be perfectly suited to France. Schools cannot simply rely on the generic categories sometimes offered by international software publishers.

How can filtering be implemented in schools?

To address these issues,the use of a centralized proxy server in schools is clearly the best solution and is one of the official recommendations of school districts regarding internet content filtering for educational activities in the national education system. Since all web traffic must pass through the centralized proxy (or rather through the web security gateway, which has a much broader scope than the proxy alone), control over the sites visited is guaranteed. In addition, the ease of implementation of such a solution significantly reduces deployment costs, which preserves the school's IT budgets.

But what can be done when certain uncontrolled workstations are likely to connect to the internet? In this case, adding a DNS filtering solution that intercepts domain name resolution by browsers will enable internet traffic to be filtered effectively and simply in order to block all types of threats or inappropriate access on all ports and protocols.

Finally, how should one decide between a whitelist and a blacklist?

The final question schools need to ask themselves iswhether or not to enable whitelist web filtering in their centralized proxy. Unlike a blacklist, which contains prohibited sites, a whitelist contains all authorized websites that users can access freely and safely while browsing the web. Trying to detect everything is not necessarily the best solution for protecting against cyber threats.

The risk would obviously be to use an overly restrictive whitelist that would only block content abusively and degrade the user experience for students, or even encourage risky behavior such as attempts to circumvent the system. That is why it has always been our priority at Olfeo to continuously enrich our database of authorized URLs for over 15 years. Today, our web recognition rate is around 98% on first use, making it perfectly suited to the needs of national education institutions in order to guarantee zero risk for students.