If you have been reading our Developer's Corner blogs, you will know that the Achilles tests examine the implementation of common industrial protocols and available proprietary protocols on a control device to determine how the device handles high-rate and malformed traffic. In this way, the tests are used to verify the communications robustness of the device.
The Satellite development team communicates with the automation industry and regulatory bodies to ensure that our tests are current, relevant and thorough. The team continuously develops new tests to expand the depth of coverage and range of protocols that are examined. However, there may be other areas that you want to examine, such as proprietary protocols that are not yet available, or you might want to execute tests that are specific to your development process. To accommodate this, the Achilles Satellite can execute user-defined tests using the Achilles monitors to observe how the test traffic impacts the device.
There are several types of user-defined tests:
- External tests that do not use the Satellite to generate test traffic.
- Storms that send packets containing a user-defined payload at a specific rate.
- Inline damage tests that intercept traffic between the device and the vendor control system (for example, an HMI) and damage it.
- Packet Capture replay tests that send data from a packet capture to the device.
- Payload damage tests that send packets containing a user-defined payload that has been systematically damaged by the Satellite.
- Grammar-based test cases that allow you to define a grammar that models a protocol's PDU structure and can include systematic variations on elements of the PDU.
While the parameters of 'normal' Achilles tests help you customize the tests to meet your needs, the user-defined tests open up further possibilities to integrate the Satellite into your testing process. It is a single test platform that can perform many testing functions: it can examine commonly deployed protocol implementations against industry specifications, test a device against Achilles Certification requirements, execute in-house quality assurance and R&D tests, and examine the implementation of proprietary protocols. You can use the Satellite monitors as a benchmark when determining the impact of test traffic (whether defined and generated by the Satellite, defined by you and generated by the Satellite, or generated by another source). For a complete record of testing, you can use the Satellite to produce a single report containing the results of all tests.