BreakingPoint First Network Equipment Testing Solution to Generate Encrypted Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Application Traffic at 10 Gigabits per Second and Faster

Austin, TX – November 5, 2008 –The numbers are impressive when you look at peer-to-peer (P2P) network traffic. Recent reports estimate that more than 100 million files are exchanged each day using P2P networks and global P2P network traffic totals 61% of all upstream network traffic and 22% of downstream bandwidth consumption¹. Large numbers, but nothing compared to the growth estimates with P2P expected to surpass 100 exabytes per month by 2015².This tremendous growth makes the ability to test network equipment with stateful P2P traffic a business imperative for network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers. BreakingPoint continues to enable realistic testing for network equipment with today’s announcement of support for encrypted BitTorrent P2P traffic, along with previous coverage for eDonkey, BitTorrent, Gnutella and 60 additional application protocols—the most in the industry. This further enables NEMs and service providers to test network devices using natively generated, stateful P2P application traffic at 10 Gigabits per second and faster.

For up to the minute network equipment testing information and conversation visit www.breakingpointlabs.com.

Testing of Network Devices and Other Equipment Must Include Actual P2P Traffic

This monumental increase in P2P traffic over the last several years have service providers scrambling to find ways to ensure that network traffic is not dropped or slowed down due to malicious or inappropriate P2P traffic.  Service providers are deploying network devices that optimize network traffic while managing vast P2P usage, all in an effort to provide a higher quality of experience.  In order to properly test the performance and security of these devices BreakingPoint has supported P2P applications including BitTorrent and eDonkey for more than a year.  This support has allowed NEMs and service providers to test network equipment using actual P2P traffic accelerated to 10 Gigabits per second and faster.

BreakingPoint is First to Provide Support for Encrypted BitTorrent

Unfortunately there are many parties that are trying to avoid the Quality of Service (QoS) policies service providers use to ensure performance by encrypting P2P data. P2P encryption is a liability to service providers through avoidance of traffic optimization or QoS policies, file obfuscation, law enforcement avoidance and exploit prevention. BreakingPoint is the only network equipment testing provider that supports testing with P2P encryption on BitTorrent, also called Message Stream Encryption. NEMs and service providers using BreakingPoint can now verify performance and security of network devices by blending P2P traffic with more than 60 additional application protocols, more than 3,600 security strikes and emulate speeds of 10 Gigabits per second and faster.

“Peer-to-peer networks are constantly evolving, ultimately causing problems for any organization that is attempting to deploy technologies that manage or limit P2P usage. The devices they are using must progress at the same rate as developing P2P protocols and testing these devices using the latest protocols becomes critical. BreakingPoint supports more than 60 application protocols, not to mention more than 3,600 security strikes, and every week we provide our customers with updated applications and strikes. Your network is constantly changing in terms of devices, applications and security strikes, our goal is to make sure that when the next big thing hits, BreakingPoint users already have it to include in their testing.”

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint accelerates the development and testing of high-performance content-aware network equipment with fast, accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use application, performance and security testing tools. BreakingPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices and customers in Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, United States and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.breakingpoint.com.

¹“Peer-to-Peer Networks, DRM and OSS/BSS,” by Dr. Matthew Lucas, 3/1/2007 and “Sandvine Releases Global Internet Traffic Trends Report,”, 10/21/2008

²“The Discovery Institute: Estimating the Exaflood,” by Bret Swanson & George Gilder, 1/29/2008