Chaperone: a content filtering web proxy based on public health policies

The idea

Public health policy for infectious disease does not work by forbidding risky behaviour; it works by making it safer — condoms, clean needles. Browsing has the same structure. Certain categories of site (adult content, warez, celebrity pages, wallpapers) carry a much higher chance of encountering malware, and their visitors are among the least likely to report a problem. Blocking them fails for the same reasons abstinence policy does. Chaperone instead analyses the site semantically and adjusts its own security level accordingly, automatically and without the user intervening.

Contributions

• A content-filtering proxy whose filtering decision is a security posture, not an allow/deny — questionable sites are treated differently rather than refused.
• Semantic analysis of the site to decide the posture, with optional messages telling the user what security status they are browsing under.
• A framing of endpoint security as a public-health problem rather than an arms race of signatures and behavioural analysis.