Our "In the Wild" evaluation of network intrusion-prevention systems took place on a live, distributed network connecting three of our Test Alliance labs. The goal was to mix elements of a multi-site enterprise network with the inherent randomness of the Internet to see how these new IPS devices would behave.

We started with our "sacrificial lambs," HP ProLiant DL330 servers running unpatched versions of Unix and Windows, and a Cisco router running V11.3 of IOS. These were put into data centers in Los Angeles (LAX) and San Jose (SJC). Each set of sacrificial lambs was protected by an in-line IPS, coexisting with other traffic in the same data centers. Because the IPS devices were installed in-line, we had to test them serially. Starting in September 2003, we evaluated one IPS device per week to see how each behaved while the Internet bucked and gyrated around us.

Because this test took a full five months to complete, several of the vendors have upgraded their products since we tested them.

For management, each vendor was invited to send its management system to our network operations center in Tucson, Ariz. In some cases, vendors sent a full-blown management server. Other times, we got nothing more than a URL with instructions to download a client. In general, we discovered that multi-site and multi-unit management is not as advanced in the IPS world as it is in the intrusion-detection system and firewall business.

In cases where out-of-band management was available, we hooked the management interfaces on the LAX and SJC sensors to an IP Security VPN we built between all three sites. In cases where in-band management was the only possibility, we simply drove these devices over the Internet. Only the management systems were given Internet access (through a NetScreen Technologies firewall) so they could download signature updates and patches as necessary; this turned out to be a problem with some products that expected the IPS device itself would be Internet accessible, a poor architectural choice on the vendor's part.

We established a task list that a typical network professional likely would have when deploying an IPS. The task list started with basic configuration tasks, including integrating the devices into the existing network. Rather than build an artificial lab environment, we dumped these boxes into a live data center, sometimes with disastrous results. In two cases, the devices managed to take down part of the data centers themselves.