This paper reviews the impact on network interoperability with protocol errors, the lack of sufficient testing prior to deployment, the role of the U.S. Government with protocol testing, a review of network protocol testing for interoperability versus conformance, and steps you can take to protect your environment.

Protocol testing is a critical step in the development of any network product, as it ensures that the product conforms to industry standards and interoperates reliably in real-world scenarios. However, the protocol testing process can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. This paper explores options and alternatives for making the protocol testing process more efficient, requiring less times, resources, and staff.

A SonicWall user recently came to us for help; the user felt the problem was within SIP and UDP. Here are some thoughts and ideas we provided to help him with his SIP diagnosis.

SIP is a somewhat troublesome protocol. The basic SIP transactions flow with a well known UDP port number. That makes it relatively easy for a firewall to allow (or disallow) the SIP protocol itself …

While many open source TCP/IP implementations are available via standard operating system distributions, some applications require changes and customization to TCP/IP. Hence, the requirement to track best practices and the current status of the protocol’s evolution. What has changed? A lot, really! …

The cost of computer security breaches is no longer hypothetical. According to the Cisco 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report (page 46), more than half (53 percent) of all attacks resulted in financial damages of more than US$500,000 (for each organization), including, but not limited to, lost revenue, customers, opportunities, and out-of-pocket costs. Interestingly, about 19% of the attacks resulted in financial damages of more than US$2.5 Million per organization! …

In 2013, Google announced a new transport protocol, the QUIC protocol (Quick UDP Internet Connections). QUIC’s original goal was to reduce transport latency, particularly with users of web apps (that use HTTP over TCP). The goal was later expanded to provide a reliable, connection-oriented, low-latency, fully encrypted transport layer. Approximately 0.9% of all websites use QUIC …

Fuzz testing is a form of brute-force testing - every possibility is thrown at the target in hopes that eventually something bad will happen and a flaw revealed. Fuzz testing is a plausible technique if the number of variations is small enough that all the possibilities can be tried in the time before the target product becomes obsolete. But with some modern network protocols the time to test all the combinations could run into years - or, in many cases, eons …

Despite what one might read in certain techno-marketing publications, IPv4 is very much alive; it has not by any stretch yet been replaced by IPv6. So it remains important that vendors of networking products do IPv4 and do it correctly.

But some vendors appear to be getting lazy …

The IPv6 Ready certification program addresses RFC Conformance and Interoperability. "RFC Conformance" mean the tests verify that the DUT (device under test) does what it is supposed to do based on the RFC specifications. "Interoperability" means the tests verify that the DUT can send and receive IPv6 datagrams to and from other devices …

Joost van Dongen of Ronimo-Games blogged about how his team uses throttling to reduce network errors for the Awesomenauts online multiplayer game. First, IWL has a team of network protocol engineers and developers. We are not game developers! We would not presume to tell anyone how to design a game. It seems that we may have a “clash of contexts”, in that game developers and network protocol engineers start with different assumptions and contexts …

Right now an increasing number of developers are deploying their applications via the cloud. In fact, Gartner predicts that the world-wide public cloud services market will reach an astonishing $287 billion by 2017. Unfortunately, many application developers are jumping head first into the cloud without realizing that there are a number of things that could go wrong …