AUGUST 26, 2009

A Look at Some of the New Features in BreakingPoint Elite

UPDATE: In Spring of 2010 BreakingPoint unveiled the pioneering Cyber Tomography Machine to help you with problems such as the ones described in this post. Read more.

Today I wanted to take a look at the latest version of BreakingPoint Elite, which is available immediately to BreakingPoint users, and includes more than 30 new features. I thought I would post a few of the features that we featured in the news release and embed a product screencast from CTO Dennis Cox demonstrating some of the features.

1) Dual Stack IPv4/IPv6 Testing Capabilities and Support for Current IPv6 Standards

BreakingPoint has the unique ability to generate blended stateful application traffic mixed with live security attacks at line-rate speeds and high session counts, delivered from the same address space. Using BreakingPoint Elite's IPv6 dual stack testing you get the industry’s most comprehensive and up to date IPv6 capable testing, allowing you to:

Simulate IPv6 traffic through each testing component including Client Simulator for load testing IPv6 capable application servers.
Ensure compliance and validate performance with the latest IPv6 standards and blended IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

2) Capture and Recreate Functionality

BreakingPoint Elite has the largest capture history buffer, with 8 Gigabytes per blade, to reduce the time it takes to debug network equipment and application servers. This latest product upgrade adds in advanced filtering of packet captures to capture and report on only the data needed. This includes:

Post-processing ability to compress the capture export, allowing you to specify start and end frames.
Berkley Packet Filter (BPF) capability to isolate traffic by IP address, port, protocol and more.
Ingress pre-processing filtering parameters based on VLAN ID, Source IP, Destination IP, Source Port and Destination Port.

Additionally you now have the ability to incorporate data originating from a real network into tests, replaying stateful traffic using the TCP stack, including three-way handshakes and any necessary retransmissions. This includes raw playback of traffic to test for common issues with ARP, RARP, TCP/UDP headers, TCP SYN floods, DDoS, invalid packets and more.

3) Pattern Matching (PCRE) for Full Data Validation of Network Security Devices

BreakingPoint Elite regular expression pattern matching validates traffic flows utilizing a user-defined data pattern by comparing that pattern against incoming network traffic. QA and R&D can quickly identify sequence errors and data errors in a network device or application server, including validation that the network equipment is generating the appropriate network traffic. BreakingPoint Elite also supports PERL Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE), to allow users to match substrings in data packets, as well as provide the ability to store the matched data for future use.

4) Impairment Support for Realistic Wide-Area Network (WAN) Simulation

Support for simulating impairments within IP traffic for realistic WAN simulation by configuring impairments within BreakingPoint Elite Network Neighborhood and easily replicating and fine-tuning for any DUT.

5) Enhanced Test Automation, Reporting and Layer 2/3 Testing Capabilities

More extensive test automation including Attack Plan Iteration that enables security testers to loop security attacks. Also, reporting enhancements include the ability to customize content to be included in reports, and export in additional formats. Finally, numerous Layer 2/3 testing capabilities have been added including UDP and enhanced HTTP support in Session Sender, addressing expansion, stateless TCP in Routing Robot and expanded frame sizes.

There are many more we could talk about, but in the meantime here is a look at how these features work from Dennis: