BreakingPoint Firewall Testing Methodology
Is your Firewall providing the protection it promises?
The BreakingPoint Firewall Test Methodology is designed to evaluate firewalls and will identify the performance characteristics of these devices as they operate in a production environment. It is crucial to understand that vendor-supplied datasheet specifications often reflect “best case” scenarios that do not mirror real-world performance. Additionally, many testing tools do not use an up-to-date library of known vulnerabilities, leaving your Firewall defenseless to attack.
Firewall testing is traditionally done using RFC 3511, “Benchmarking Methodology for Firewall Performance”, specifically Section 5.1, “IP Throughput of RFC 3511”, which focuses on determining only the throughput and forwarding rate for unicast IP packets sent at a constant rate and packet size. While stateless UDP traffic performance is valuable in determining the raw packet forwarding performance of the engine, it is not applicable to real world deployments.
The BreakingPoint Firewall Test Methodology is designed to accurately emulate the production environment in which the firewall will be deployed. BreakingPoint testing tools use the most recent vulnerabilities, stateful application mixes, accurate load, a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) and more to ensure your test is realistic, repeatable and deterministic.