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RE: IPSEC stress tester?




Thanks for all the replies. I guess what I'm looking for is a test suite 
that has knowledge of the IPSEC/IKE protocols and tries to expose
weaknesses.

Some simple examples could be:

- sending ESP/AH packets to various SPI values
- creating IPSEC-SA with IKE, and then sending corrupted ESP/AH packet
(man-in-the-middle tests)
- replay attacks
- pre-shared key guessing for Phase1 break-in attempts
- sending in ESP packets that contain IP packets not covered by the Phase-2
negotiation
- 'exploding' IPCOMP packets

We could probably come up with a fairly long list between us.  I would like
to see such a tool so that VPN CPE customers can sleep at nights knowing
their CPE has passed these tests.

So far, I've tried tools intended for firewall testing, and, as you would
expect, they
don't do much with a router that is armed with IPSEC.

This sounds like an opportunity for someone. From the number of holes I've
had to fix in our IPSEC implementation, this someone probably works for a
company with IPSEC products.
Steve.



-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Hoffman [mailto:paul.hoffman@vpnc.org]
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 1999 9:41 PM
To: Waters, Stephen; 'ipsec@tis.com'
Subject: Re: IPSEC stress tester?



>I'm looking for a test suite that will stress-test an IPSEC security
>gateway.
>Can anyone recommend something? If the product doesn't exist, maybe a
>service does?  I would prefer a product that I can re-use at my leisure as
>part of a regression test program.

Depends on what you mean by "stress test". There are at least two 
orthogonal types of stress tests people have proposed: speed and 
number/type of SAs. Creating software/hardware to test either type of 
stress is easy; creating tests that are useful in the real world is 
probably difficult without discussion from many vendors and customers.

A few companies have suggested that VPNC create some standard 
stress-testing regimen, not so that someone can say "Product A runs faster 
under stress than Product B", but so they ca say "if you put Product C on 
one end of an Internet connection with a line speed of N, you can be sure 
that the line speed will limit you sooner than the processing power of 
Product C". Once VPNC gets up and running, I hope that the members will 
want to discuss this more, and that we make the results public so that 
anyone can run the tests themselves.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium