Mu Line Blog
Posted under: Front Line, Mu External Test Lab - METL
In a recent article published in Dark Reading, we read this:
"Nearly 80 percent of security products fail to perform as intended when first tested -- and most require two or more cycles of testing before achieving certification, according to a new report from ICSA Labs, which performs security product testing.
The ICSA Labs Product Assurance Report -- a first-of-its-kind study co-authored by ICSA and the Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report research team -- offers insights from ICSA's tests of thousands of security products from the past 20 years."
That's just the beginning.
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By Thomas Maufer on 18 November 2009 - 04:18:34 PM.
Posted under: Front Line
Current approaches to improving productivity while managing costs associated with support, test and development are failing. A big part of the engineering team's efforts that are often unacknowledged and not planned for, involve dealing with customer issues after deployment. This affects operational cost, time to market for new services and reputation with customers. Using the Mu solution, there is a better way forward that tremendously increases the effectiveness of engineering teams involved in support, test and development.
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By Aswath Mohan on 03 November 2009 - 09:59:50 AM.
Posted under: CEO Desk
The reality is that testing industry has not kept pace with the rapid innovation around IP services evident within carrier networks, within the smart grid initiatives, within government, within Software as a Service and within the Cloud….until now.
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By Dave Kresse on 19 October 2009 - 09:31:00 AM.
Posted under: CEO Desk
Mu Dynamics' key breakthrough around testing IP services is in effectively overcoming the challenge posed by the unique and rapidly changing nature of operator’s IP services.
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By Dave Kresse on 19 October 2009 - 09:25:59 AM.
Posted under: CEO Desk
I am very proud and fortunate to be working with such dedicated and talented people at Mu Dynamics. That feeling of pride ramped up a notch higher today as we publicly announce a true breakthrough in IP service testing.
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By Dave Kresse on 18 October 2009 - 09:25:27 PM.
Posted under: CTO Workbench, Front Line
Mu Dynamics' pcapr now has access to over 26.3 million additional packets. Dive in and explore!!
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By Thomas Maufer on 24 August 2009 - 12:46:00 PM.
Posted under: CTO Workbench, Front Line
Anyone who has ever compared the IP service traffic on a network with what the standards say is supposed to be happening will find less than perfect agreement. Standards define the structures and semantics of services and underlying protocols and all the associated terminology, but are only a snapshot of a moment in time. With the rapid evolution of standards, it's impractical to wait for test equipment vendors to catch up with Test Suites that comply with those standards, and in fact this may not even be desirable.
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By Thomas Maufer on 12 August 2009 - 10:52:54 AM.
Posted under: Competitors, Front Line
Mu Dynamics Blog: End customers know that product features and functionality information from vendors do not give them valuable insight into the quality or suitability of a product for their use. Customer Proof Of Concept labs (CPoC labs) are now testing and demonstrating exactly how products perform in their network and IP Service environment.
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By Ajit Sancheti on 10 August 2009 - 11:59:15 AM.
Posted under: Competitors, Front Line
...Trust is the result of a rigorous, scientific testing process applied consistently throughout the deployment life cycle. The thing about trust is that the operator can try to buy best-of-breed equipment, hire the best operations team, etc., but at the end of the day, a single bad customer experience undermines all that hard work. Building trust is much harder than breaking it....
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By Thomas Maufer on 22 July 2009 - 11:13:49 AM.
Posted under: Competitors, Front Line
...Trust is the result of a rigorous, scientific testing process applied consistently throughout the deployment life cycle. The thing about trust is that the operator can try to buy best-of-breed equipment, hire the best operations team, etc., but at the end of the day, a single bad customer experience undermines all that hard work. Building trust is much harder than breaking it....
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By Thomas Maufer on 21 July 2009 - 03:44:58 PM.
Posted under: Competitors, Front Line
In the test space the traditional model for testing any NEW service or protocol is fundamentally broken. The rate at which new services and protocols are being rolled out for consumers will need a new model for generating and running tests.
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By Aswath Mohan on 10 July 2009 - 02:32:25 PM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, Front Line
I was fortunate to be
part of Mu's initial Bay Area Mu User Group (MUG) last night in Milpitas.
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By Dave Kresse on 26 June 2009 - 11:08:23 AM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, Front Line
I started noticing several interesting trends in our customers about six months ago, and it really hit home when I spoke at the NAB show on IPTV testing a couple of weeks back.
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By Dave Kresse on 02 June 2009 - 11:34:08 AM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, Front Line
With the large increase in converged application and service deployments (VoIP, IPTV, IMS, VPLS data services, etc.), I am on the road talking with Mu’s operator, government and vendor supplier customers on a consistent and frequent basis.
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By Dave Kresse on 28 May 2009 - 09:15:25 AM.
Posted under: Competitors, Front Line
Is this latest bump in the economy a resurgence or just another corner? How can you learn to plan for the unexpected and unknown? Broad topic but very applicable to the growing number of leading network operators and their vendors using Mu to more completely test their networked applications and product development processes (software development life cycle, or SDLC).
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By Adam Stein on 25 March 2009 - 05:01:51 PM.
Posted under: Front Line
Patrick wrote an excellent blog posting (http://www.nwwsubscribe.com/community/node/38818) about the way that Protocol Fuzzing could be used to find bugs like the recently disclosed "INVITE of Death." Patrick's blog made me wonder whether he's aware of the multiple commercially available fuzzing solutions that are on the market; of course, Mu has been shipping such a capability for almost 4 years now as part of a comprehensive automated reliability, availability and security testing solution.
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By Thomas Maufer on 16 March 2009 - 04:34:29 PM.
Posted under: Front Line
The top-25 list certainly stimulated some discussion, but to my mind it placed too much of the blame for bugs on the programmer and didn't have enough appreciation of the role of complexity of networked software systems. The right way to tackle this problem is through thorough testing, using invalid or unexpected traffic based on what the software will be exposed to in the real world
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By Thomas Maufer on 23 January 2009 - 05:12:05 PM.
Posted under: Front Line
When faced with complex systems with complex behaviors, software engineering tools and processes deployed throughout the software development life cycle must embrace, not ignore, the complexity in order to eliminate most bugs before the code is deployed in the field. Any tool that only looks at the code (source or binary) without testing the reactions of the code to real (broken) traffic, isn't even scratching the surface.
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By Thomas Maufer on 22 January 2009 - 10:03:37 AM.
Posted under: Front Line
Is it really as simple as this: "There appears to be broad agreement on the programming errors," SANS Director Mason Brown said. "Now it is time to fix them. First, we need to make sure every programmer knows how to write code that is free of the Top 25 errors, and then we need to make sure every programming team has processes in place to find, fix or avoid these problems and has the tools needed to verify their code is as free of these errors as automated tools can verify." ?
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By Thomas Maufer on 21 January 2009 - 04:19:43 PM.
Posted under: CTO Workbench, Front Line, Mu External Test Lab - METL
Mu's had quite a few customer and prospect demonstrations around newer Service Level Traffic variation and related Mu Test Suite automation capabilities during the last month. From 20-31 October, the every 2 year MSF GMI event; from 19-22 October there was MPLS 2008; and on Nov 6, a customer case-study seminar for leading operators and vendors. This week offers IMS-based IPTV demonstrations at TelcoTV in Anaheim.
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By Thomas Maufer on 11 November 2008 - 09:22:20 PM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, CTO Workbench, Front Line
Mu's operator and vendor customers are scoring a competitive advantage by taking service complexity head on to ensure their specific service or product offering rises above all others.
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By Adam Stein on 19 October 2008 - 11:04:21 PM.
Posted under: Competitors, CTO Workbench, Front Line
The recent Iron Chef event at Black Hat was a +1 for fuzzing where it was more effective than static code analysis (SCA) according to Dark Reading. It's also very interesting to me (and others) that both approaches found different bugs, but fuzzing found the important one (obviously) to do with interaction of the application with the rest of the environment.
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By Kowsik Guruswamy on 19 August 2008 - 04:36:57 PM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, Competitors, CTO Workbench, Front Line, Mu External Test Lab - METL, Overseas Observations
And now, the exciting conclusion to "Verifying Service Readiness with DoS"...
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By Ken Elwell on 08 July 2008 - 04:14:17 PM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, Competitors, CTO Workbench, Front Line, Mu External Test Lab - METL, Overseas Observations
Recently one of my European colleagues fielded a pretty important customer question about our Denial of Service module’s relevancy to the telecom industry. These customers have been using Service Level Traffic Variations pretty successfully for a year or so stateside to find potential points of failure and get them fixed. So what makes the Mu’s Denial of Service module particularly useful to service providers?
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By Ken Elwell on 08 July 2008 - 02:03:17 PM.
Posted under: Front Line, Mu External Test Lab - METL
NXT 2008 had heavy interest in several NGN topics including:
# Ensuring real-time VoIP quality for all portions of an operator’s network
# Building reliable and available IPTV deployments by eliminating product weaknesses
# Figuring out what IP applications would attract the most business – and operator subscribers
# Preventing downtime for next-generation network applications like IPTV and VoIP, including deployments based on the IMS Architecture
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By Adam Stein on 23 June 2008 - 05:12:57 PM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, Front Line
A bigger part of the interest comes from the collision of norms happening right now within these organizations. The collision is between those who grew up in the Telco business and those who grew up in the world of IP, and at the heart of the conflict is the issue of reliability, availability, and security of end user services. This is also precisely where Mu Dynamics adds its value.
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By Dave Kresse on 23 May 2008 - 12:04:25 PM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, Front Line
Mu is updating its company name to “Mu Dynamics” to reflect a growing solution set around the dynamic nature of network services, applications and wide range of end to end network products. Mu continues to address a broader set of problems faced by customers that focus on the challenges posed by service, application, and network downtime.
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By Dave Kresse on 20 May 2008 - 10:45:56 AM.
Posted under: Front Line, Mu External Test Lab - METL
Downtime costs money, and organized testing is one of the only formal ways to manage or reduce downtime. Mu showed it's newest VoIP robustness and service assurance tools in 3 very public locations last week: cisco's Toolapalooza, Software Test & Performance and SIPit-22. This blog posting focuses on SIPit-22.
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By Thomas Maufer on 18 April 2008 - 02:52:48 PM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, Front Line
The inherent complexity of the products and protocols delivering VoIP, IPTV services and IMS architecture makes it increasingly challenging for carriers and MSO’s to provide service assurance.
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By Dave Kresse on 26 March 2008 - 05:27:52 PM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, CTO Workbench, Overseas Observations
A significant IPTV outage happened recently because the Pakistan Telecommunications Agency (PTA) operations group changed its router configuration and told the world (perhaps by accident, perhaps not) that they had an excellent route to part of the IP address space owned by YouTube.
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By Thomas Maufer on 07 March 2008 - 01:34:24 PM.
Posted under: CEO Desk, CTO Workbench, Overseas Observations
A significant IPTV outage happened this past weekend because the Pakistan Telecommunications Agency (PTA) operations group changed its router configuration and told the world (perhaps by accident, perhaps not) that they had an excellent route to part of the IP address space owned by YouTube.
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By Thomas Maufer on 28 February 2008 - 04:36:26 PM.
Posted under: CTO Workbench, Front Line
Last week's Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-008 - "Critical Vulnerability in OLE Automation Could Allow Remote Code Execution (947890)" could leave many Critical Infrastructure operators exposed to OPC (OLE for Process Control) weaknesses.
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By Eric Byres on 19 February 2008 - 06:17:04 PM.
Posted under: Front Line, Overseas Observations
IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) architecture adoption by leading service providers and their suppliers is moving ahead due to better interoperability and availability/resiliency assurance testing before deployment in production Carrier networks. Tier one MSO and Carriers and taking steps this week to help speed IMS deployment of advanced IP services.
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By Adam Stein on 11 February 2008 - 04:22:48 PM.
Posted under: Front Line
At the recent SANS SCADA in New Orleans, Eric Byres, Byres Security CTO and Kevin Staggs, engineering fellow and global security architect, Honeywell Process Solutions discussed and demonstrated for the first time how undisclosed serial-based critical infrastructure products, including those with IP-based network architectures, are quite exposed to more safety issues and ultimately, failures, in ways never before possible.
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By Adam Stein on 11 February 2008 - 04:16:41 PM.
Posted under: Front Line
During a 9 month study recently Mu Security released, Network Strategy Partners principal Peter Fetterolf interviewed a number of leading service providers and their network product suppliers to learn more about the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) benefits of using negative testing metrics during both product deployment and development. Fetterolf’s findings quantify both service provider and network supplier dollars (often $10,000 or more per incident) saved by minimizing downtime and maximizing service availability. NSP Partner whitepaper and Internet Telephony’s Webcast also include 4 service provider, cable operator and vendor supplier case studies.
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By Adam Stein on 30 January 2008 - 05:20:24 PM.
Posted under: Mu External Test Lab - METL
This first Mu Line blog topic focuses on how both service providers and their suppliers are integrating automated negative testing throughout their respective deployment and development lifecycles to reduce downtime due to product weaknesses and vulnerabilities – many of which are unique to their customers differing network use cases.
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By Adam Stein on 22 January 2008 - 12:16:24 PM.
Posted under: Front Line
Welcome to Mu’s first web log (The Mu Line blog) post of 2008. Many of Mu’s service provider, critical infrastructure and network product vendor customers have been asking for more regular industry updates on both the business and technical benefits of negative testing and fuzzing use cases. We’re responding with the new Mu Line blog that will include first-hand posts from Mu’s customer front line worldwide, Mu’s global network of external test labs, our CTO and other industry observations.
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By Mu Dynamics on 22 January 2008 - 12:11:35 PM.
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