Design and Development of Centralized Squid Proxy Management System

Commercial proxy solutions are not always cost-effective and easy to implement. Due to their closed nature, they are often difficult to customize and also have security concerns. Open source solutions serve better in such situations. Squid is one such popular open source web proxy server. A large organization with multiple categories of users, networks and implementation constraints cannot fulfill all its security requirements with a single proxy server thus requiring multi server deployment. Manual management of multiple proxy servers is cumbersome and requires technically strong operator. Webmin, an open source squid proxy management solution makes the process automatic for a single server but requires a separate instance for each server in a multi-server scenario which leads to management complexity. A centralized management solution is thus required. Configuration Management tools like Chef, Puppet etc though provide centralized management features but these are suited for generic tasks and require effort for tool setup, learning tool's language, writing scripts etc and therefore do not serve the purpose. In this paper, we present a solution for centralized squid proxy management, named CSPMS (Centralized Squid Proxy Management System) which does auto-installation of proxy server as well as provides a web based interface for framing policies and deploying them across remote servers. It has features like group based policy management, cloning, proxy parameter tuning, basic and advanced modes of access control, remote policy deployment, periodic policy checks and re-deployment, backup and restore etc which makes multi-server management fast and easy with reduced human intervention.