Ever since Napster started a phenomenon called peer-to-peer (P2P) networking a few years ago, many Internet users have taken up some kind of file sharing. In a recent announcement,  BreakingPoint Systems said P2P has a tendency to overload networks already strained by high-bandwidth traffic. This puts a direct pressure on the network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers to supply equipment that can withstand this traffic.

 

BreakingPoint announced support for encrypted BitTorrent (News - Alert) P2P traffic and claimed that this enables realistic testing for network equipment. The company has covered the P2P programs such as eDonkey, BitTorrent, Gnutella and 60 other application protocols in the past. This gives NEMs and service providers the much-needed ability to test network devices using indigenously produced, stateful P2P application traffic.

 

Often, providers use Quality of Service (QoS) policies to make sure that the performance goes well in the P2P networks. But BreakingPojnt suggests that there are many parties who encrypt the data sent in a P2P channel to avoid these policies. As service providers face the issues such as traffic optimization or QoS policies, file obfuscation, law enforcement avoidance and exploit prevention, P2P encryption will be a liability for them in the long run.

 

BreakingPoint claims to be the only network equipment testing provider that supports testing with P2P encryption on BitTorrent. Now, to verify performance and security of network devices, NEMs and service providers need to combine more than 60 additional application protocols and more than 3,600 security strikes. Along with this, they also need to emulate speeds of 10 Gigabits per second and faster.

 

In the vast sea of P2P network, service providers often struggle to save the network traffic from malware or inappropriate P2P traffic. To provide better quality of experience, service providers are deploying devices that enhance performance and make sure that the show runs as planned. BreakingPoint has supported P2P applications including BitTorrent and eDonkey for more than a year. With this, NEMs and service providers can test network equipment with the help of P2P traffic accelerated to 10 Gigabits per second and faster. Recently, the company also provided extensive security tests for Microsoft's (News - Alert) Patch.

 

“Peer-to-peer networks are constantly evolving, ultimately causing problems for any organization that is attempting to deploy technologies that manage or limit P2P usage,” said Dennis Cox (News - Alert), chief technology officer at BreakingPoint, in a statement. “The devices they are using must progress at the same rate as developing P2P protocols and testing these devices using the latest protocols becomes critical. BreakingPoint supports more than 60 application protocols, not to mention more than 3,600 security strikes, and every week we provide our customers with updated applications and strikes. Your network is constantly changing in terms of devices, applications and security strikes, our goal is to make sure that when the next big thing hits, BreakingPoint users already have it to include in their testing.”