About Us


InterWorking Lab creates network testing, network emulation, and network optimization products including penetration testing products, WAN emulators, bandwidth emulators, satellite emulators, network traffic testers and network traffic analyzers to improve the quality and operation of voice and data networks.

Developers, IT managers, and test engineers use our network testing products, network simulators and network analyzers to find and fix bugs in network devices.

Our network emulation products are used for pre-deployment testing, proof-of-concept demonstrations, and "what-if" scenarios.

Our network simulators and network traffic analyzers are used by small and medium businesses to optimize their internal network performance.

Assuring Product Quality and Integrity

Prominent members of the Internet Engineering Task Force, and other notable networking experts serve on our Advisory Board to provide advice and review of our products. This guidance allows us to create the most accurate, thorough, and timely products including penetration testing products, WAN emulators, bandwidth emulators, satellite emulators, network traffic testers and network traffic analyzers that conform to the latest protocol standards. Our network testing, network emulation, and network optimization products and services enable our customers to develop and deploy the highest quality and most reliable network devices and to obtain maximum utility from their networks.

The Advisory Board

InterWorking Labs works with technology experts from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with special expertise in networking protocols:

  • Andy Bierman, Consultant
  • Jeff Case, SNMP Research
  • Dave Perkins, Author
  • Randy Presuhn, Consultant
  • Steve Waldbusser, Consultant

Advisors Emeritus:

  • Karl Auerbach, Chief Instigator, InterWorking Labs
  • Marshall T. Rose, Author and Consultant

Beginnings

InterWorking Labs was co-founded by Marshall Rose and Chris Wellens who met while serving on the Interop Program Committee. Chris was the Director of Technology for Interop and Marshall was a Working Group Chair in the IETF for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

It was 1992 and both Chris and Marshall were concerned with the poor quality of SNMP implementations. Marshall agreed to create a set of tests if Chris would organize a group of developers into an interoperability test summit.  Chris did so by establishing InterWorking Labs  in 1993 and producing the first SNMP interoperability test summit in January of 1994.

A shocking number of implementations failed the majority of the tests and there were only 50 tests! From those beginnings, SilverCreek, the authoritative SNMP Test Suite (or SNMP tester) was created.  Today SilverCreek contains hundreds of thousands of tests that cover protocol conformance, compliance, stress testing, robustness/vulnerability testing, negative, inopportune, and interoperability testing. SilverCreek is used by thousands of users worldwide.

From Protocol Tests to Network Emulation

The Maxwell and Mini Maxwell network emulators help developers and end users create more realistic network emulation scenarios by providing standard packet impairments, as well as protocol impairments and support for concurrent multiple flows of network traffic. Maxwell supports a set of protocol impairments for TCP/IP, DHCP, ICMP, and SIP testing.