BreakingPoint Publishes Firewall Testing Methodology

Austin, TX – January 13, 2008 –  BreakingPoint today released its Firewall Testing Methodology, updating aging testing procedures promoted by legacy testing vendors, which provide a false perception of performance and security. This traditional Firewall testing, based upon RFC 3511 and RFC 2544, was created at a time when testing vendors did not have the capabilities to test Firewalls with multi-gigabit per second speeds using stateful application traffic.

As a result, current test criteria for Firewalls are focused on specific protocols, traffic, or ports and only determine throughput and forwarding rate for unicast IP packets sent at a constant rate and packet size. This is not reflective of actual network traffic, nor does it take into consideration different features and settings now used in today’s Firewalls.

Download the Firewall Testing Methodology and view the video tutorial.

BreakingPoint Firewall Testing Methodology Accelerates Product Development

BreakingPoint CTO, Dennis Cox
“Firewalls are complex devices that no longer simply look at TCP headers or IP packs; today they incorporate technologies such as rate shaping and deep packet inspection. At the same time, Firewall testing failures and their subsequent performance and security problems in deployment has led to a reexamination of testing methods and even testing tools. People are beginning to realize that to test any network device, including Firewalls, you must provide the most realistic testing environment possible. The Firewall in your network will need to handle stateful application traffic, dynamic rule sets, live exploit tests, realistic device configuration, increasing data speeds and probably much more. You need to be testing the device in the exact same way.”

The BreakingPoint Firewall Testing Methodology provides step-by-step guidelines on how to emulate a production network environment and run a Firewall test that includes stateful application traffic, dynamic rule sets, live exploit tests, realistic device configuration, and more. Using the BreakingPoint Firewall Testing Methodology, Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers will see more accurate performance and security testing results, as well as reduce their time-to-test and accelerate the development and deployment of the devices.

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.