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 …

The question of “how many bits” were sent and received clearly is a matter of interest when measuring data rates or data quantities. Mobile providers, consumer ISP's, consumers, and regulators talk a lot about their speed and (not so often) about their data caps. But rarely, if ever, are sufficient details provided …

The Trump Administration proposes to "pause" and review an Obama-era program designed to improve wage transparency -- so women and minorities could learn how their compensation stacked up to white men. The Trump administration argues that the government's pay data collection process is "unnecessarily burdensome” …

All of the IWL staff has worked long and hard on perfecting a TLS Test Suite. Our clients — DevSecOps engineers — need to find bugs and security vulnerabilities in apps and devices before deployment. Once they’ve identified these problems, the problems are corrected and retested prior to deployment …

Last month I received a number of fun and friendly birthday wishes on Facebook. Though this was a sweet and kind gesture by each of the well-wishers, I felt guilty. That’s because … it was not my birthday! Facebook thinks my birthday is June 22, 1910, but the day, the month, and the year are all wrong.

So you may wonder: Why would I intentionally lie about my birthday on Facebook? …

Women who work in automotive technology met at the British Bankers Club in Menlo Park last night for a lively discussion. The women represented many facets of the industry — research scientists at the major automotive companies, new infotainment and VR startups, regulatory and compliance lawyers, venture capitalists, and, of course, automotive test solution suppliers, like IWL …

Often when we read news stories, we find them lacking any technical substance. It would seem that the writer aborted the story before asking any interesting questions that would allow us, as technical professionals, to fully understand the story and draw our own conclusions …

Security researchers claim to have discovered an SNMP flaw that affects several models of Internet-connected devices. Presumably hackers could send random values in specific requests to the SNMP agent in various devices and the authentication mechanism would be bypassed …

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 …

Have you thought about how you will test the performance of IoT apps and drones? Our new video demonstrates performance testing of an IOT application controlling the ESP8266 Microcomputer mounted on a drone! As you might expect, as the drone flies further away from the wireless base station, performance degrades. So how can you emulate that in your test lab? …

Waze, the “…world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app” failed its users in the Santa Cruz, California area during the month of February 2017. These users who depend on Waze to find out traffic conditions and alternate routes were not able to do so. The same was true for Google Maps. For example, when traffic stalled for up to three hours, Waze and Google Maps happily reported that conditions were just fine …

A New York City based start-up company, Confide, offers a text messaging system “with encrypted messages that self-destruct.” You can download the app at getconfide.com. Confide lets its users “discuss sensitive topics, brainstorm ideas or give unfiltered opinions without fear of the Internet’s permanent, digital record and with no copies left behind.” …