A Testing Framework for High-Speed Network and Security Devices

There is an increasing availability of high throughput networks which leads to the need of security appliances in these networks. Testing these appliances with regards to performance and effectiveness relies on testing tools that can achieve or even surpass the capabilities of the devices and networks under test. However, current tools are not capable of achieving both the flexibility and performance demands of modern high-speed security equipment. We propose a concept and an architecture that can fulfil these demands and introduce the General Purpose Network Testing Framework (GPNTF) as a prototype implementation. This framework can achieve high throughput while being highly adaptable with regard to network testing scenarios.