Help Ukrainian Ukraine economy and refugees by hiring Ukrainian Software Developers - we donate a lot to charities and volunteer foundations

Ukraine

Inetguardian

Goal

Children’s safety in the online world

Overview

It's known that 5.43 million young people in the UK alone have experienced cyber-bullying. What a child sees and experiences online cannot be unseen! Paul and Johanna were right to assume that they need the help of IT partner to produce this project. Zfort Group took part in development of an easy-to-use tool that can help parents to make their children’s browsing experience safer
  • Paul Ford
  • Johanna Ford

Client

Paul and Johanna Ford are co-founders of Edge IT Ltd with more than 40 years’ experience in the IT Industry. After having a young family of their own, they started developing an easy-to-use tool that can help parents and carers to manage their children’s online world

Problem

We need a service that gives parents quick and easy access to their children’s activity (via a dashboard) while allowing children to explore the Internet in a safe and protected way

Solution

Zfort Group began with the analysis of changing requirements and then created 3 different project versions.
Initially, we developed a proxy server with the ability to control and block Internet traffic. Then the development team also added time and volume restrictions. Later, iOS application was implemented to make installation and configuration of network services on iPhones and iPads easier.

Now iNet Guardian works by proxying the traffic from the device to the iNet Guardian cloud service that blocks any inappropriate traffic.

iNet Guardian allows parents and carers to have informed and practical discussions with their children, leading to a safer and more educational online experience

Key Points

  • Processing of HTTPS (encrypted) traffic, which is computationally expensive
  • Large amount of user and connections

Challenge

We had to create a scalable pool of on-demand proxy servers and find a good balance between number of active users and number of nodes running simultaneously

Key Features

Technologies

Most of the functionality is implemented with PHP framework Yii2. The proxy components are implemented with usage of Node.js and Python (because of huge number of concurrent connections and the need to process a lot of data simultaneously). StrongSwan, an open source IPsec-based VPN solution, was used to setup connections. Application for iOS platform was made using Swift

Our Roles

  • 1 Python Developer
  • 1 PHP/Yii Developer
  • 1 Front End Developer
  • 1 iOS Developer
  • 1 Quality Assurance Engineer
  • 1 Project Manager
  • 1 DevOps

Results

iNet Guardian is a cloud-based service that allows parents to easily manage family online activity. This tool was designed to make children's usage of the Internet safer. The more children understand the reasons for them to stay safe online, the easier it is to incorporate online safety into their everyday lives. Our responsibility as providers of Parental Guidance software and services is to not only provide the tools to do the job, but to provide parents and carers with up to date information about trends in their children’s online world
Download PDF