Flinder automated security and robustness testing

Security and robustness have become key properties in software development. Besides traditional, human intelligence based manual testing and evaluation techniques automated solutions are needed to fight the ever advancing hacking techniques and to face the challenge of today's security requirements. The ever-increasing size of IT solutions, where manual techniques are no longer capable of handling the growing complexity, also calls for automated techniques.

To answer this challenge SEARCH-LAB developed and is continuously upgrading its security and robustness testing framework, called Flinder. By generating and executing a huge number of test cases, Flinder is capable of identifying most typical programming bugs that are the causes of common security vulnerabilities.

Advantages of Flinder

The portfolio of services and tools of SEARCH-LAB was created in order to offer the maximum benefit to our customers:

• SEARCH-LAB has a long experience and professional expertise in security, which was achieved by executing security audits for several customers over a decade. Since security evaluations always need up-to-date monitoring of the advancements in hacking technologies, the most effective and cost saving way is to execute these tasks as an outsourced service.
• For customers who do not intend to invest in in-house security capabilities, SEARCH-LAB offers end-to-end IT security services from requirement specification through test planning, test vector generation and execution up to regression testing. Outsourcing all these services ensures not just the professional level of the results, but the cost effective execution within time and budget limits.
• Flinder security and robustness testing framework was designed and developed to be as flexible and robust as possible to support any platforms from servers through desktops to embedded systems including mobile operator environments. Flinder is also capable of testing any complex protocols, even if they use encryption, digital signatures, compression or any other encodings, where other testing tools cannot be applied.

To learn more about the advantages of SEARCH-LAB and Flinder click here.

Licensing and service possibilities

SEARCH-LAB offers Flinder in an optimized portfolio comprising of the following packages:

Test vectors

SEARCH-LAB licenses different sets of test vectors for widely used common file formats, like image, video and other media file formats. These packages can be used to effective test standard components of a system.

Testing services

SEARCH-LAB also offers to carry out the whole process of security and robustness testing. In this case SEARCH-LAB creates a test framework, which can automatically create, dispatch, execute and assess the test cases, and this way carry out the resource-intensive testing. By outsourcing the testing tasks to SEARCH-LAB, our customers can reduce their costs by benefiting from our expertise and existing test environment.

Regression testing tools

Finally, SEARCH-LAB also offers to its customers regression testing support. Flinder Test Re-run Tools can be licensed, with which our customers can re-build our test environment and execute the tests on their own. This way Flinder can efficiently be included in the regression testing framework of the development lifecycle.

Additionally, we are convinced that Flinder's flexibility, SEARCH-LAB's experience combined with our customer-friendly licensing strategy and cost-effective services result in a solution, which has unarguable advantages over other competing products or services.

For more details about our pricing principles click here.

Detailed information about our services and tool packages can be found here.

Typical Flinder project setup

A typical Flinder security and robustness testing project comprises of the following project phases:

Preparation phase (1-4 weeks)

• Test environment setup
• Customization
• Deliverable: Test Plan

Test execution phase (1-3 weeks)

• Automated test execution
• Deliverable: Automatically generated test reports

Evaluation & recommendation phase (1 weeks)

• Risk analysis
• Recommendation collection
• Deliverable: Test Report

Regression testing phase (8-12 weeks)

• Flinder Re-run Tool
• Deliverable: Regression Report