Firewall testing provides assurance that a firewall will stop threats and malicious traffic without affecting throughput and productivity.

Firewalls must protect network assets without impacting performance. Unfortunately, every network is different, and vendors don’t know how their solutions will perform on your specific network. Firewall testing provides assurance that a firewall will stop threats and malicious traffic—all the way down to the virtual machine level—without affecting throughput and productivity.

What to Test

Validating firewall protection requires test realism through multi-dimensional scalability and extensive test coverage, including standards-based testing (RFC 3511) at three levels:

• End-to-end infrastructure, from the DMZ to the VM inside the server
• Inter-server connections (between servers)
• Intra-server connections between individual VMs on a single server

Firewall test cases should assess:

• The effect of a denial-of-service attack on performance
• HTTP transfer rate-of-performance
• HTTP transaction rate-of-performance
• DNS A and AAAA record performance while under attack
• Protection and performance at the VM level compared to a physical appliance
• The performance impact of enabling different levels of security
• SLA performance while under attack
• Performance impact of a virtual migration

Spirent Solutions

Spirent firewall testing solutions help organizations validate firewall performance and protection:

• Avalanche provides complete multi 10Gbps security, attack and performance testing, enabling users to test firewalls at line rate speeds to simulate daily business traffic and understand the impact of network faults and attacks
• Spirent Studio Security is a testing solution purpose-built for validating security capabilities via fuzz testing, DDOS replication, vulnerability assessment and security capability verification
• Professional Services - Enterprise OnDEMAND On-Site Performance Testing is designed to detect and mitigate problems before you launch any new infrastructure or IT solution
• Support Services ensure that system technology is always current and operating at maximum performance