NSS Labs to do more security-product testing without vendor funding

For several years NSS Labs has mainly done vendor-sponsored testing of security products in its Austin, Texas evaluation lab, but the firm is now shifting its focus to do many more independent self-funded projects for test reports that will be labeled as such.

“We will be doing tests that are completely without vendor funding,” says Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs. As an example, the lab just completed an independent test of the 3Com TippingPoint 10 intrusion-prevention system (IPS). In a test series of 209 exploits run against it, the IPS did not score particularly well, detecting only 82 of them, he said. NSS Labs also expects to be able to publish in October an independent test of about 10 IPS gateway products.

NSS Labs anticipates selling its self-funded product-testing reports, but pricing is not yet available.

The security-products testing lab recently released a Web browser security test report which was an in-depth comparison of specific security capabilities in several browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Chrome and Safari, and did acknowledge that Microsoft, whose browser performed the best, funded the security evaluation.