Network Activity for Parental Monitoring

As internet usage among children for entertainment and educational purposes continues to rise, parents increasingly seek ways to monitor or restrict access to inappropriate content. Traditional parental control software, though effective, often requires installation on each device and can be costly, while free alternatives like Wireshark offer complex displays that are not user-friendly for home monitoring. This paper presents the development of HomeShark, a Python-based application designed to monitor entire home networks from a single device. By leveraging DNS lookups, HomeShark provides an easy-tounderstand interface that reports the online activities of all devices on the network, offering a more accessible solution for parents.