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Today, in a connected world, several devices must communicate with each other uninterruptedly. The multi-device landscape including smart phones, wearables and home devices interact to offer an immersive user experience. Often, when these devices are from different manufacturers, there arises a conflict in terms of interoperability. Therefore, the need for interoperability testing becomes essential to ensure that these devices work together flawlessly.

Significance of interoperability testing

The test verifies if different devices, applications and systems interact in such a way that it helps hassle-free exchange of data and implements tasks as expected to provide the best experience for end users. Therefore, the fundamental objective of interoperability testing is to recognize and address compatibility issues between different devices designed by different manufacturers, when they work together in a connected ecosystem.

Why is interoperability testing considered important?

Interoperability testing is key in a muti-device environment, due to a number of reasons. We shall investigate each of these reasons. Understanding the need for interoperability testing is significant in multi-device ecosystem helps manufacturers to implement it without fail.

Minimizes Compatibility Problems

As mentioned earlier, when several devices work together, compatibility issues can happen. Interoperability testing helps recognize and address these issues in the first place. As a result, devices from different manufacturers work together without any compatibility issues.

Exceptional User Experience

Interoperability testing is implemented to understand the efficiency of devices working together without any compatibility problems. Therefore, in a multi-device environment when all devices work together to offer the best performance, they can offer an interactive experience for end users.

Better Control of Resources and Time

Since interoperability testing focuses on identifying and addressing compatibility issues in advance, it helps manufacturers save time as well as resources. Further, it minimizes expensive rework, testing and debugging.

Radio Frequency (RF) Testing in Interoperability Testing

Apart from testing the efficacy of interoperability between the devices, it is also important to test the communication protocols these devices use. At this stage, Radio Frequency testing is considered significant. RF testing involves testing the radio frequency signals the devices use to interact with each other. In other words, it involves signal quality, signal strength and interference testing.

RF testing verifies if devices can interact effectively in any environment. Say, for example, a wearable device has to communicate with a smart home device during heavily crowded situations. Radio Frequency testing guarantees that the quality and signal strength are enough to provide flawless communication.

In fact, Radio Frequency testing helps manufacturers verify that their devices can interact without any issues under different environments. Also, it tests devices in different locations, for example in a field or inside a lab. 

A Few Challenges in Interoperability Testing

Interoperability testing is essential, but it has a lot many challenges. Getting to know the bottlenecks and limitations would help devise a better plan or adopt the best practices to implement interoperability testing. 

Many Devices from Different Manufacturers

Since there are several devices, operating systems and communication protocols, it can make the testing even more challenging.

Complex and Time-consuming

When multiple devices are involved, verifying the interactions between several devices can become complex and also consumes time.

Minimal Resources

Often, manufacturers have limited resources, for example in terms of time, persons, budget and so on. As a result, it can make interoperability testing difficult.

Some Best Practices for Interoperability Testing

Even though interoperability testing poses challenges, manufacturers can stick to the following best practices. 

Create a complete test plan

The first and foremost step is to devise a plan that includes all the possible interactions between the devices. It involves steps such as identifying test scenarios, defining test cases, determining test environment, prioritizing test cases, creating test scripts, executing test cases, analyzing test results and refining the test plan based on the test results.

Reliance on Automated Testing Tools

To a great extent, using automated testing tools helps streamline the testing process and minimize the risk of manual error. Automated testing brings several advantages such as improved accuracy, increased test coverage, reduced costs, faster feedback and increased efficiency. Some of the common automated testing tools include Selenium, TestComplete, Appium, Cucumber and JMeter.

Collaboration Among Manufacturers

Collaborating with other manufacturers ensures that the devices interact and work together to provide a great end user experience. Further it improves interoperability, minimizes costs and gives a competitive advantage. For this, there should be clear cut objectives, define responsibilities, create shared test plan, establish communication channels and promote a collaborative culture.

Endnote

Interoperability testing is essential for a multi-device environment. When devices work together, ensure their efficiency by carefully incorporating Radio Frequency testing, providing support for innovation and collaboration. In the end, it guarantees the best performance and user experience while reducing costs. Furthermore, manufacturers can identify and fix any compatibility issues early on when a large number of devices work together.

Featured image by Dave Weatherall on Unsplash

The post Why Interoperability Testing is Essential for Multi-Device Ecosystem? appeared first on noupe.

Running a website can be time-consuming and arduous on its own when you have to manage all the various aspects such as the front-end design, the back-end maintenance, the hosting, etc. 

One of the challenges that you have to face as a website owner or administrator is detecting and mitigating cyber threats. These threats seek to damage your website and bring it down, or worse, utilize its data for malicious purposes.

In this post, we will discuss five strategies to safeguard your website against common threats. But first, we will talk about the threats themselves to understand what exactly you have to watch out for.

Common Types of Cyber Threats to Watch Out For

Here is a brief list of the different types of cyber threats that you need to keep an eye out for:

• Phishing scams: One of the threats your website can face is phishing. Phishing is a widespread problem, and it involves a malicious party posing to be from a reputable company to swindle people out of their private data or money. As a website, you are responsible for ensuring that no one can impersonate you by using an email address associated with your domain. We will guide you on how to do that in the below sections.
• DDoS attacks: In a DDoS attack, a website is inundated with an influx of internet traffic that renders it incapable of working correctly. The website cannot process incoming requests and becomes temporarily disrupted. The purpose of these attacks is to disable the website and make it incapable of handling the requests of actual users.
• Brute force attacks: In a brute force attack, a malicious party attempts to enter various login combinations into the sign-in portal of the website. A sheer number of combinations are entered quickly, and the goal is for one of them to go through so that the malicious party can access the restricted part of the website.

We can cover many other threats here as well, but let’s get into the main part of this post, i.e., how can you secure your website against them?

5 Strategies to Secure Your Website Against Common Threats

1. Ensure the correct configuration of DMARC records on your domain

Let’s talk about how you can protect your website against the first threat we discussed, i.e., phishing.

To protect a malicious party from using your domain’s email address, you must ensure the DMARC records are correctly configured.

What exactly are DMARC records? DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. It is a protocol used alongside SPF and DKIM records to ensure that emails sent by a domain are authorized and untampered with.

• SPF stands for sender policy framework. It contains a list of the email servers that can send email messages on behalf of a domain. When an email is received by an email server, the latter checks the SPF records in the sender domain. Only if the sending email server is present in the SPF list is the message accepted as authoritative.
• DKIM stands for Domain Keys Identified Mail. The DKIM record contains a public key used by a recipient email server to ensure the message hasn’t been tampered with. When an email message is sent, a special digital signature is created using the private key based on the message’s contents. Once received, the signature is deciphered using the public key in the domain’s DKIM records. If changes are made to the message’s contents, the signature will no longer match when deciphered.
• DMARC records define what happens to the incoming emails if they fail the SPF/DKIM checks. The emails can be quarantined, blocked, or allowed to pass through. These records also define the email reporting parameters, i.e., which email address the reports are sent to when the reports have to be generated, etc.

You can check to see if the DMARC records for your domain are correctly set up by running a DNS lookup. A DNS lookup reveals all the DNS records configured for a domain. The DMARC records, including SPF and DKIM, can be found as TXT records.

If these records are not in your domain, you can create them by accessing the DNS zone. This can be done by signing into your domain’s control panel (cPanel, in many cases).

Here is a detailed guide that you can refer to for setting up DNS records for your domain: https://www.cloudways.com/blog/dns-record/

2. Make sure to use a hosting service that provides DDoS mitigation

Methods such as traffic filtering and rate limiting are used to prevent DDoS attacks.

• Traffic filtering is a method in which incoming traffic is checked meticulously and then allowed/blocked depending on where it’s coming from and how much it is. For example, a massive influx of traffic from a suspicious source (i.e., a source typically involved in malicious activity) can be filtered so that a DDoS attack cannot be initiated.
• Rate limiting, on the other hand, is a method using which the number of incoming requests from a source is set not to exceed a certain limit during a specific time frame. This is also an efficient way to mitigate DDoS attacks as it disallows a large number of requests to be made from a single online source.

How can you, as a website owner, enjoy these features? You have to make sure you buy and use a hosting that provides them. These features are implemented at the hosting level. Here are some of the popular hosting providers that offer DDoS protection:

• Cloudflare
• GoDaddy
• Namecheap

3. Set up multifactor authentication to avoid having user data stolen

Another threat that we mentioned above is brute force attacks. Brute force attacks involve a malicious attempt to log in to a user account by using a large number of password combinations. This type of attack can be neutralized if multifactor authentication is set up.

Multifactor authentication requires users to enter a code received via email or SMS to verify the login attempt.

With multifactor authentication, the malicious party must contend with the verification step even if the brute force attack worked. They won’t be able to do it since they won’t have access to the SMS or email messages of the person they’re posing as.

You can set up multifactor authentication on your website by using apps like Google Authenticator. Here is a guide that you can check out to learn more.

4. Utilize ORM frameworks to avoid SQL injection risks

To prevent the risk of SQL injections, you can use ORM frameworks. ORM stands for object-relational mapping. With ORM frameworks, website developers don’t have to rely on raw SQL queries to manage their website databases.

ORM frameworks essentially let developers manage the website databases using an intermediary interface. These frameworks significantly reduce SQL injection risks using parameterized queries, preventing malicious inputs from altering the database query logic.

For example, without an ORM framework in place, a hacker could use this string:

‘ OR ‘1’=’1′; —

…to gain information from the database.

How exactly? Let’s explain.

SQL requires an input in the following format:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘admin’ AND password = ‘password123’;

The string mentioned above, i.e., ‘ OR ‘1’=’1′; — is a classic SQL injection attack. When used in a login form, it changes the query:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ” OR ‘1’=’1′ AND password = ”

…to a statement that always comes out as true. As a result, the authentication is bypassed and access is granted. 

However, ORM frameworks would have a more specific input acceptance criterion. For example, Python’s SQLAlchemy ORM requires the user input to be in the following format:

session.query(User).filter_by(username=”admin”).first()

This structured query approach makes it harder for hackers to exploit input vulnerabilities.

5. Keep all of your website software updated to avoid security issues

Your website relies on different types of software to keep running. For example, you could run your website on a CMS like WordPress, Wix, or Shopify. You may also have integrations or plugins in your website for added functionalities.

It is important to keep all the software associated with your website updated. Updating your website’s CMS is especially important as the new updates often contain security patches. The details and vulnerabilities of the previous version are made public. That information can be maliciously used to attack websites still running on the old version. This is why updating your website’s software (especially the CMS) is very important. 

Conclusion

If you follow the five strategies mentioned above, you can safeguard your website against common online threats. Many websites don’t take these precautions, and that causes them to face various consequences, such as losing valuable user data. Even their online presence stays in peril as a hacking attempt can bring down the website.

But if you take the steps mentioned above, you can avoid these types of outcomes and ensure that your website stays up and running as it should.

Featured image by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash

The post 5 Strategies to Secure Your Website Against Common Threats appeared first on noupe.