NetClean WhiteBox

The Technology Solution - NetClean WhiteBox

Part of the solution is being employed by governments and the Internet industry to minimise the viewing of this material on the Internet and also minimise the distribution channels currently available to the criminal rings producing it. Various ISP Filtering technologies have been implemented around the world and have been had mixed and not always perfect results. In part this has been because no one technical solution was designed for the purpose of blocking CSAI.

Now there is technology specifically designed for this purpose - NetClean Whitebox, which blocks access to known sites containing images of child sexual abuse. Here are a few pointers about this technology.

What does NetClean Whitebox block access to?

Working with regional NGO’s, Law Enforcement and Government blacklists the NetClean WhiteBox denies end users access to previously identified and blacklisted websites containing child sexual abuse images. This means that if internet users, willingly or not, try to access such a page, they will instead face a stop sign, explaining that the page is not available for viewing.

How does it work?

NetClean WhiteBox is a specially developed hybrid product that combines routing with deep packet inspection. Simplified, you could say that this product makes the routers in a network direct certain traffic via NetClean WhiteBox, so that when a user tries to reach a server that contains any child pornography, once checked against the URL blacklist, illegal requests are blocked and legal requests are allowed through. The WhiteBox server contains the URL block list of the sites to be blocked. It looks up these URLs using DNS and resolves them to their IP addresses. These addresses are propagated to the networks to be filtered via BGP. Traffic to these IP addresses from the networks is routed through the tunnels to the WhiteBox server that checks the URL against the blocking list. If a match is made, a block page is sent to the requestor. If a match is not made, the request continues to the web site and it is accessed as normal.

NetClean Whitebox has no Effect on Performance

NetClean WhiteBox was originally developed for one of the fastest networks in the world. This runs at 10Gb/s and supports over 350,000 users. It had no effect on the performance of their Internet access. It has been implemented on the backbone of international carrier Telia Sonera's network and has no effect on user performance.

NetClean Whitebox is Completely Fail-Safe

NetClean’s WhiteBox implementation is fail-safe. This means that failure of the filtering server will have no effect on the Internet traffic on the filtered network, however filtering will not work while the server is down. This ensures that the WhiteBox system can be installed on mission-critical networks with full confidence.

NetClean Whitebox can be customised to use any Blacklist

NetClean WhiteBox can be configured to use URL blocking lists provided by customers or authorities within their region. It can also use lists provided by other authorities such as the one managed by the ACMA in Australia or the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in the UK.

Install your own NetClean WhiteBox

NetClean Whitebox Filtering is normally implemented by installing the Whitebox filtering servers within the ISP network.