Child Rescue Coalition (CRC) is a nonprofit organization that develops advanced technology to help law enforcement identify and rescue children from sexual exploitation. With more than 12,000 investigators trained across 106 countries, CRC’s tools have contributed to the arrest of over 17,000 offenders and the rescue of more than 3,900 children.
Image: One minute of illicit activity captured by Child Rescue Coalition technology
To support these high-stakes missions, CRC relies on KrakenD Unlimited. Donated as part of KrakenD’s commitment to social good, the API Gateway has become a core component of CRC’s infrastructure, enabling secure, scalable integrations with partners such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and federal law enforcement agencies across several countries..
Child Rescue Coalition challenges
CRC faced a combination of technical and organizational challenges:
- Massive scale with lean resources: managing hundreds of internal microservices plus dozens of public ones, all with a small technical team.
- Security overhead: previously handled in application code, consuming staff time and duplicating functionality.
- Integration friction: each partner required different authentication methods, formats, or filtering, leading to custom development.
- Legacy migration: multiple API versions and endpoints needed smooth transitions without breaking law enforcement workflows.
- Kubernetes migration: initial tests with other gateways revealed heavy database dependencies and complex configurations that increased operational overhead.
As William Wiltse, CRC’s de facto CTO, explained:
We had tried other API gateways like Kong, but KrakenD was the first that solved our problems without introducing new complexity. Every release removes workarounds we had built, and that has been a huge relief for our developers.
The Solution: KrakenD API Gateway
KrakenD became the first line of entry into all CRC API services. Its stateless, database-free design provided simplicity and performance, while advanced enterprise features allowed CRC to adapt to diverse partner needs.
Key capabilities in action:
- Authentication versatility: OAuth2, API keys with RBAC, and JWT claim extraction let CRC align with different partner security requirements.
- Virtual Hosts and Wildcards: streamlined routing across hundreds of microservices and Kubernetes workloads, even acting as an ingress controller in some cases.
- Backward compatibility: multiple API versions co-exist, letting partners transition at their own pace without downtime.
- Aggregation and workflows: ability to consolidate responses from different sources into unified outputs reduced the need for custom microservices.
- Monitoring and telemetry: Prometheus integration gives real-time visibility, essential for mission-critical operations.
Enabling Global Partnerships
KrakenD is the backbone of CRC’s integrations with major global partners.
With NCMEC
NCMEC receives tens of millions of CyberTips annually, primarily from online platforms reporting suspected child abuse content. Through KrakenD:
- CRC now enables high-volume, batch IP lookups, cross-referencing NCMEC CyberTip data against CRC’s peer-to-peer intelligence.
- Results are embedded into CyberTips before reaching law enforcement, providing richer, faster leads.
With Global Law Enforcement
Offenders increasingly use encrypted chat platforms. CRC’s advanced tools provide investigators with the ability to record chat rooms’ metadata.
- Through KrakenD, law enforcement analysts securely pull content links at scale for review.
- Abuse material is categorized and these results are fed back to CRC, enriching their global intelligence pool.
- References to new abuse material allow CRC to better identify high-harm offenders across a variety of technology platforms and provide enhanced leads to investigators globally.
William Wiltse highlighted the impact:
Through KrakenD, we can support all of our partners with high-volume, secure API connections. These integrations accelerate lead triage and victim identification, something that directly saves lives.
Results and Impact
- Law enforcement efficiency: CyberTips are now cross-checked with peer-to-peer intelligence, giving investigators actionable context immediately.
- Developer productivity: CRC’s small team avoids building custom integrations for each partner, focusing instead on advanced internal tools.
- Reliability at scale: CRC processes massive volumes of requests daily without compromising performance or security.
- Flexibility for the future: New initiatives, such as banking sector collaborations to flag suspicious payments linked to live child abuse, will run through KrakenD.
As Wiltse noted:
KrakenD has become a core piece of technology for us. Every new integration or external project starts with the assumption that it will run through KrakenD.
Lessons Beyond CRC
Nothing compares to the urgency of protecting children. CRC’s mission is singular in its importance, but their use of KrakenD highlights how the same technical foundations can also support other sectors facing their own high-stakes challenges.
- Banking & Fintech: Detecting fraud and monitoring suspicious transactions at scale requires the same flexibility, authentication diversity, and performance that CRC applies to protect children.
- Healthcare & Government: Sensitive data flows demand secure, compliant, and interoperable API connections, echoing CRC’s need to safely integrate with partners worldwide.
- Enterprises Everywhere: Organizations migrating from legacy systems, consolidating APIs, or managing high-traffic ecosystems can benefit from the same orchestration and scalability that CRC relies on daily.
The lesson is clear: infrastructure that proves reliable under the extreme conditions of global child protection can provide confidence and resilience in any industry where secure, scalable integrations are mission-critical.
