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Brian MonkmanPrograms Manager, ICSA LabsApril 11, 2023

Scalable Performance TestingHow Spirent Makes That Possible

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About ICSA Labs

Best Known ForProviding 3rd Party Assurance– Through ISO-Accredited Testing

Testing Security Products

~25 YearsTesting Since 1991– Anti-virus Products– Network Firewalls – Etc.

ISO Accredited– ISO 9001 & 17025

Seal of Approval

Newest InitiativesHealthcare Testing– EHR & IHE USA

Mobility Testing– Platform Security for Verizon Wireless– Enterprise Mobile Apps

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About Reservoir Labs

Founded in 199020 employee– More then half hold a Ph.D. in either Engineering or Computer Science

Significant work in “extreme scale” or “exascale” computing technologies

Next generation security monitorExtends the state-of the art Bro analytics language

Real-time threat detection and network monitoring solution

Scalable to 100 Gbps and beyond

R-Scope Network Security

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Reservoir LabsICSA Labs Test Engagement

Purpose of this test – empirically measure the performance of Reservoir Lab’s R-Scope appliance and

consequently the bro software

Performance definition– the percentage of HTTP transactions analyzed– A transaction consists of a single request packet (HTTP GET) and one or more response

packets (HTTP 200 OK)– number of response packets is a function of the size of the HTML document that is

included in the response

Variables and domains used during this test– R-Scope variables

»Number of analyzers (a)a = {4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32}

»Number of forwarders (f)f = {4, 8}

»*a + f must be <= 36

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Reservoir LabsICSA Labs Test Engagement

Variables and domains used during this test (continued)– HTTP Traffic Variables:

»Payload size (p)p = {8kB, 16kB, 32kB, 64kB, 128kB, 256kB, 512kB, 1024kB}

»Bandwidth (n)n = {100Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, 2Gbps}

Variables and constraints create over 350 unique combinations– Number will grow as bandwidth ceiling increased

Attempting to discover the optimal R-Scope configuration given the payload size and bandwidth– also interested in seeing how payload size impacts the performance of the R-Scope

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Test Environment

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Why Spirent

Provide purpose-built testing solutions that permit us to recreate a mix of application traffic based on real applications

Scalable and flexible

Given the volume of tests and scenarios we need to execute scripting capabilities are required - Spirent delivers

Ability to craft traffic mix from own pcaps

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