Ruckus URL Filtering - subscription license (5 years) - 1 access point

Administrators can use the URL filtering feature to block access to inappropriate websites. The web pages available on the internet are classified into different categories, and those identified to be blocked can be configured based on available categories. Administrators can also create policies based on these categories, to allow or deny user access.

After categorizing websites accessed by the clients connected to the AP, a third-party cloud-hosted URL categorization service is used to categorize the live web traffic generated from the client devices. By default, traffic which is not categorized is allowed. The packets from the client device are dropped only after the URL is successfully categorized, and DENY is configured for the client in the policy. The AP periodically generates statistics such as the Top 10 Denied URLs/categories, Top 10 URLs/categories by traffic and sends them to controller which collects this information and maintains it based on the filters applied per zone and WLAN.

URLs are typically classified by third-party applications to enhance internet security and usage. To categorize the web page or URL, the network packets must be analyzed. In HTTP packets, the complete URL value is extracted and in HTTPS packets, the domain name of the URL is extracted for URL web page categorization. The AP remembers the signature of the packet it forwards and when the packet is identified as HTTP or HTTPS, it receives the domain name/URL from the packet and sends it to the third-party URL categorization engine to verify the Web category. If the retrieved category is blocked as per the configured policy, packets with the same signature are blocked. Blocked HTTP browser traffic redirects the user to a web page that provides information on why the access to the website was denied.