10 IoT Security Testing Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 19 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
With so many different IoT testing tools available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to test the functionality and performance of IoT devices and systems but need to figure out which tool is best. I've got you! In this post I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different IoT testing software with various teams and projects, with my picks of the best IoT testing tools.
What Are IoT Testing Tools?
IoT (Internet of Things) testing tools are software used to evaluate the performance, functionality, and security of IoT devices and systems. These tools simulate real-world conditions to test how IoT components interact, manage data, and maintain connectivity in various environments. They address the unique challenges of IoT ecosystems, such as diverse device types, complex network structures, and large-scale data processing.
The benefits of IoT testing tools include ensuring the reliability and efficiency of IoT devices in different operational scenarios. They help in identifying and mitigating security vulnerabilities, enhancing the overall safety of the IoT network. By verifying the accuracy and integrity of data handling, these tools also contribute to the trustworthiness of IoT systems. Additionally, they aid in optimizing the user experience and ensuring seamless interoperability between different IoT components, crucial for the smooth functioning of complex IoT ecosystems.
Overviews Of The 10 Best IoT Testing Tools
Here’s a brief description of each of the IoT testing tools to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the interface.
QA Wolf is a comprehensive QA automation platform and service designed for companies seeking efficient and reliable automated testing solutions. It stands out for its human-led approach to automation. This means that all tests are led and managed by experts to ensure high-quality results. QA Wolf supports a wide range of testing needs, including functional, regression, and end-to-end testing, making it suitable for various industries.
When it comes to IoT testing, QA Wolf excels by offering a suite of features tailored to the unique challenges of connected devices. It allows for direct interaction with physical hardware, enabling comprehensive functional regression testing between devices and their corresponding browser-based control apps.
The platform also supports virtual device emulation, where device firmware and software are hosted virtually, providing a flexible and scalable testing environment. Additionally, QA Wolf’s API testing capabilities allow for thorough testing of device-to-app interactions without the need for physical devices.
QA Wolf supports testing across various development environments, including static shared environments like testing, staging, and production, as well as preview and ephemeral environments. Its compatibility with emulated browsers for all iOS and Android devices, along with major browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, ensures comprehensive coverage. It also has the ability to operate on public and VPN networks.
QA Wolf provides pricing upon request.
Datadog
Real-Time Observability of Entire Infrastructure Stack Metrics in One Place.
Datadog is a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring tool that assists IT administrators maintain the overall health of their networks, extending beyond cloud service models to incorporate serverless ecosystems.
Datadog is feature-rich to supports any service stack or application layer, whether its monitoring the health of the CI pipeline or maintaining regulatory compliance transparency through audits across pipelines. It facilitates cloud migration and digital transformation with tools that enable collaboration among business, operations, and development teams.
Datadog provides security, network, database, and synthetic monitoring in addition to log management and optimizing application performance. With real user monitoring, Datadog allows teams to monitor user journeys, especially frontend performance in one place. This provides an integrated view of running services and IT programs across a network, including a comprehensive view of serverless applications.
Datadog provides an abundance of features for robust application management. encompasses the ability to trace requests across distributed systems, and track and understand user behavior. You can schedule automated report generation and real-time alerts to fortify your system against digital threats.
When it comes to dashboards, Datadog offers administrators with two choices. It allows teams to quickly assemble a customized monitoring dashboard to accommodate any specialized need. Alternatively, they can choose the prefabricated dashboards that come with Datadog.
Datadog supports as many as 350 integrations with its variety of API services covering key network protocols such as SSH (Secure Shell), SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).
In addition to a 14-day free trial, Datadog offers three pricing tiers: Free, Pro ($15 per host/month), and Enterprise ($23 per host/month).
Appknox is an automated testing suite that provides on-demand mobile application security to enable businesses to detect and remediate vulnerabilities. AppKnox applies DevSecOps throughout the CI/CD lifecycle by scanning mobile apps during their development phase, during deployment and delivery, and even after publishing in app stores.
In so doing, it reduces the friction of adoption, complexity, manpower costs, and delivery timelines. Moreover, AppKnox offers a flexible engagement model that provides businesses with several deployment models and approaches to their security requirements. Its strategy is to use a smart system approach combined with expert human resources. From manual application testing, vulnerability assessment tools, issue tracking, and remediation calls.
With its vast API capabilities, AppKnox makes it easy to integrate into the application development cycle, providing a worthy API testing partner, whether it is for securing apps by STAST, DAST, or the server-side of things. This integration typically involves logic, data, and other relevant objects with other software applications.
AppKnox has three tiers, namely Essential, Professional, and Enterprise. Essential provides a one-time vulnerability assessment and targets organizations just getting started with mobile application security. On the other hand, Professional is ideal for businesses who seek unlimited vulnerability assessments and multiple updates on the same app while Enterprise is for banks and enterprises with mission-critical security needs.
AppKnox prices are available on quote.
Intelligent IoT simulation tool for testing and building IoT/MQTT applications
As the Internet of Things has grown in popularity, the BevyWise IoT simulator is increasingly sought to test IoT applications and the messaging communication protocol (MQTT) that it relies on.
BevyWise allows engineers to test IoT applications with or without physical devices. They can either create templates effectively that act as placeholders for physical devices or simulate thousands of unique virtual devices in a matter of minutes.
BevyWise IoT simulator has four pricing tiers, which are differentiated by features supported and the number of clients permitted. However, they are standard pricing packages, which means you only pay once but use it in perpetuity.
Stream allows 1,000 clients and costs $599. River allows 5,000 clients and costs $1,799. Sea allows 10,000 clients and costs $2,999. Ocean allows unlimited clients but you need to contact sales for a price quotation.
Mobot
Automated testing for IoT devices using real-life robots that click, flip, and swipe
Mobot is a SaaS product that's designed to help QA teams with IoT testing by giving the responsibility over to mechanical robots. Once you upload and customize your test to Mobot's self-serve test plan tool, a robot will perform the test and generate a report that your team can use to improve your product.
Cross-platform testing enables organizations to automate tests for applications across different operating systems, devices, and browsers. This ensures consistent testing coverage and helps identify platform-specific issues and compatibility problems. Mobot is particularly adept at testing mobile applications on both iOS and Android devices. It offers comprehensive support for different device models, operating system versions, and screen sizes, ensuring thorough testing across the mobile ecosystem.
Mobot stands out for its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, making it exceptionally adept at automating complex and dynamic test scenarios. Unlike many traditional QA testing tools that rely on static scripts, Mobot leverages machine learning algorithms to adapt and evolve its test scripts based on the application's behavior. This unique feature allows Mobot to perform exploratory testing by learning from previous test runs and identifying potential areas of concern or instability.
Testers can also automate user interactions such as clicking buttons, entering text, and verifying expected outputs using Mobot's automation solutions. This helps ensure that the application's UI is responsive and functions as intended. Mobot's test automation solutions serve many purposes, including cross-platform testing and UI and functional testing.
Mobot provides detailed reports and analysis of test results across all tested platforms. Testers can easily identify discrepancies, bugs, and performance issues specific to particular platforms, making it easier to prioritize and address cross-platform concerns.
Mobot integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jenkins, GitHub, Jira, Trello, Bugzilla, TestRail, Zephyr, and Microsoft Azure.
Mobot pricing starts at $1,500/month/action. Further pricing information is available upon request. A 30-day free trial is also available.
If you need to fully manage and secure a fleet or group of IoT devices, then AWS IoT Device Defender is the tool. It enables organizations to audit security policies and automate security assessments to ensure IoT configurations don’t deviate from best practices.
In addition to continuously monitoring IoT devices, AWS IoT Device Defender’s other key capabilities include authenticating devices, detecting anomalies, encrypting device data, and auditing device cloud-side configurations.
It employs machine learning algorithms to detect anomalies in device behavior, especially when they exceed manually-defined static thresholds. AWS IoT Device Defender sends alerts when it discovers security risks. This can occur under conditions such as when a disconnect or gap exists in IoT configurations, erroneous sharing of identity certificates across several devices or even having an improper device with a revoked certificate attempting to connect to the AWS IoT core.
Its security management duties encompass collecting and reporting security metrics. This, in turn, automatically triggers necessary remediation or mitigation operations such as rebooting or deploying the appropriate security patches.
AWS IoT Device Defender integrates with various Amazon services such as AWS IoT, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Connected Vehicle Solution, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), and much more.
In terms of pricing, there are no minimum fees or mandatory services - you only pay what you use with AWS IoT Device Defender. Therefore, the AWS Pricing Calculator is provided to give users an indication of the estimate they’ll be charged based on the architecture of your customized services.
However, several options include Audit pricing, Rules Detect pricing, and ML Detect pricing. In this vein, the AWS Free Tier provides limits for new customers on Audit (free for all devices in the fleet for the first month) and Rules Detect (1 million metric data points for the first month).
Alternatively, you can request a quote from the sales department.
IBM Watson IoT Platform (IBM Bluemix) is a fully-managed, cloud-hosted platform that enables businesses to take advantage of data analytics to extract value from sensors and connected devices. Ultimately, the IBM Watson IoT Platform helps you effectively manage these IoT devices so your apps can benefit from their live and historical data using REST and real-time APIs.
IBM Watson IoT Platform (IBM Bluemix) empowers organizations to generate insights with visualization dashboards, and even create business models from the operation of billions of connected devices and endpoints. It provides a huge range of possibilities for analytic apps as diverse as weather data, blockchain capabilities, and Watson cognitive APIs that provide improved user experience with image recognition and natural voice interfaces.
It provides many tools and starting points to do so, allowing organizations to connect their device gateways to an IBM Cloud recipe using lightweight MQTTP or HTTP protocols. Its AI-driven analytics allows organizations to start small yet scale fast by processing IoT data quickly.
IBM Watson IoT Platform also comprises features that allow organizations to rethink their business strategy with IoT, like data management tools that facilitate enterprise asset management, gain greater control of complex environments, and streamline business operations across silos.
Watson IoT Platform service plans are convoluted and depend on a multitude of factors like data-transfer limits, usage-based billing, cloud-to-device-sends, and many more esoteric factors. It also has metrics like Data Exchanged, Data Analyzed, and Edge Data Analyzed that have tiered priced modeling depending on how their volume increases.
CloudTest enables organizations to prepare their environments for anticipated or predicted spikes in application loads. CloudTest helps you to gauge whether your system can adequately respond to unforeseen or sudden spikes in user activity.
It provides real-time application load and performance testing to help ensure your infrastructure has a dispersed workload. CloudTest also gives real-time feedback that makes it possible to quickly identify problems with better accuracy. In so doing, organizations are able to plan for events such as campaign promotions and holiday sales by subsequently bulletproofing their online infrastructure.
CloudTest is user-friendly, without any coding required to set variables, parameters, or validations. In addition, it also allows you to reuse and combine tests. Apart from performance testing, CloudTest can be integrated into the software development lifecycle, by allowing QA testers to automate CI/CD operation checks, and operations staff to evaluate performance at scale while empowering developers to test API services.
CloudTest integrates with CI/CD pipelines, along with offering the choice of either a fully managed service or a self-service solution.
Pricing for CloudTest is available upon request.
Shodan is like a search engine for internet-connected devices. It enables users, most especially security experts discover information and make more intelligent decisions using a variety of filters. Shodan helps to safeguard IoT endpoints and internet-facing devices like servers, routers, thermostats, maritime satellites, and even baby monitors.
Moreover, due to its public-facing nature, it readily finds worthy use cases in industries as far-fetched and dispersed as transportation, energy, power, water treatment facilities, and much more. In that regard, Shodan also helps identify systems and sensitive devices that shouldn’t be publicly accessible for security purposes such as traffic lights, security cameras, industrial supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems,
As an IoT search engine, Shodan can be used to keep track of activities on these and users’ devices by launching scans and receiving real-time alert notifications, especially when something goes awry. Hence, it allows users to gain complete visibility with connected devices and subsequently troubleshoot vulnerabilities.
This includes identifying phishing websites, data leaks on the cloud, and compromised databases.
Shodan can be used to limit IoT devices to local-only connections because they don’t typically need to be online or share information with other devices. Shodan provides users with convenience by offering both a command-line interface and a website app for monitoring.
It has a developer-friendly API which allows it to integrate with several communication mediums to provide notification options such as Gitter, PagerDuty, Slack, Discord, MS Teams, Telegram, and so on.
Shodan has three options tiers, namely Freelancer, Small Business, and Corporate priced at $69 per month, $359 per month, and $1099 per month respectively.
Wireshark
Provides a granular live view of LAN and wireless network signals across communication protocols.
Wireshark is an open-source network tracker and troubleshooting tool for analyzing traffic. It is both a packet capture tool and a network protocol analyzer. It is ideal for discovering different kinds of network bugs, including capturing TCAP messages generated during calls.
Its features include dividing network calls into layers, thereby facilitating better analysis and troubleshooting. When Wireshark is in operation, the users of the network don’t notice any perceptible difference in service. This is because Wireshark doesn’t intercept the network packets; they are only copied, so the stream of network traffic reaches its intended destination.
Its GUI makes it possible to display various types of packets and filter different types of traffic. It is a network sniffer that can be used on a multi-platform basis, covering Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris, and NetBSD, among others. In addition, it also operates on LAN and wireless communications.
Among the distinguishing features provided for the user include the ability to offer multiple levels of details, including customizable, color-coded identification of packet types. Wireshark provides a data visualization viewing panel with deep inspection and decryption support of several communication protocols.
Wireshark allows you to generate and output reports in plain text, XML, CSV, and other formats.
Wireshark is free and open source.
The Best IoT Testing Tools Summary
Tools | Price | |
---|---|---|
QA Wolf | From $149/user/month | Website |
Datadog | From $15/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
Appknox | Pricing upon request | Website |
Bevywise IoT Simulator | Pricing upon request | Website |
Mobot | $1,500/month/action (tap, swipe, click, etc.) | Website |
AWS IoT Device Defender | Pricing upon request | Website |
IBM Watson IoT Platform (IBM Bluemix) | No details | Website |
CloudTest | Pricing upon request | Website |
Shodan | From $69/month | Website |
Wireshark | Open source project and available for free | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best IoT testing tools? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): I look for an attractive yet sparse UI because IoT testing involves juggling several moving parts and devices. So, extra care should be taken not to overwhelm the user with irrelevant details.
- Usability: In this case, I look for user-friendliness and relative ease in accomplishing tasks since these tend to have an outsized influence on user experience.
- Integrations: No application is wholly self-sufficient, no matter how good it is. Hence, integrations are necessary to allow them play nice with other software tools and plug into other domain expertise.
- Value for $: I look for cost-effectiveness and affordability relative to the depth and breadth of functionality offered by the IoT tool.
IoT Security Testing Key Features
- Network and connectivity scanning: Because IoT devices are able to transmit data wirelessly, one of its centerpieces is traffic monitoring technologies that scan, detect, and scrutinize network packets. Moreover, the strength of connectivity has to be evaluated once established to ensure data packets are adequately delivered.
- Automated security testing: In addition to testing whether the data being transmitted is encrypted, IoT testing tools have to evaluate how effective the solution is with regard to verifying threats, risks, and vulnerabilities. The best IoT testing tools optimize these activities with automation testing features that perform a range of activities like searching for weaknesses, examining compatibility across platforms, and so on.
- Interoperability: This ensures IoT testing cooperates with other complementary tools and provides a uniform, quality end-user experience when integrated across different platforms.
- Scalability: IoT ecosystems tend to be vast and increase rapidly. So, testing tools need to have the capacity to handle large volumes of endpoints along with the ability to scale their testing scope as device workload rises.
What Do You Think About This List?
I would like to get your thoughts and feedback on this IoT testing list, so kindly leave a comment.
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