NSS Labs Chooses Spirent for SSL Testing of NGFW

NSS Labs Inc. has chosen security offerings from Spirent (News - Alert) Communications to assess the SSL capabilities of Next Generation Firewalls, or NGFW. Nine major NGFW offerings available in the market were appraised by the NSS test for safety efficacy, performance, enterprise administration competences and total cost of ownership.

Web applications are normally secured using SSL. Enterprises, however, face difficulties while selecting between barring the usage of SSL on corporate networks and making sure that their security devices are capable of managing inspection of encrypted traffic at practical rates.

In a statement, Ankur Chadda, Product Marketing Manager at Spirent Communications (News - Alert) said, “With a majority of online transactions moving towards SSL-based encrypted traffic, communications become secure but it adds a lot more stress on network. Testing SSL gives IT professionals the empirical data to understand how many users can be supported by the network or if consumer devices can be supported securely.”

The SSL traffic segment of the 2013 NGFW Group Test was authenticated by NSS Labs in association with Spirent. The NGFW’s capability to interrupt, decrypt, process and re-encrypt HTTPS traffic at different network loads using varied cipher sizes was established by the test with the help of Spirent Avalanche.

Bob Walder, Chief Research Officer of NSS Labs said, "By adding Spirent equipment to our test harness we were able to generate high volumes of encrypted traffic, allowing us to validate the ability of security devices to decode and inspect SSL traffic under load.”

Spirent will be providing information related to the security test at the RSA (News - Alert) Conference 2013, scheduled from February 26-28 in San Francisco. Spirent will be present at booth No. 2525.

Spirent Communications specializes in offering test and measurement services. Spirent’s exhaustive array of offerings are ideal for testing data centers, cloud computing and virtualized environments, high speed Ethernet networks and services, 3G/4G wireless networks and devices, network and application security, and positioning technologies. Spirent has its headquarters in Crawley, UK.  

Analysts at NSS Labs assist their customers in fulfilling their business requirements. The organization provides professional, independent and trusted results, ably supported totally by empirical research.