Summary SS7 was designed without integral security in mind. Its design is based on the use of dedicated physical facilities, making it difficult to compromise externally. In addition, at the time of design, fewer network operators existed | Summary SS7 was designed without integral security in mind. Its design is based on the use of dedicated physical facilities making it difficult to compromise externally. In addition at the time of design fewer network operators existed and the number of interconnections was limited. With the increasing convergence in communications SS7 is no longer as isolated as it once was. To minimize the risks screening may be implemented and monitoring systems put in place. Screening lets you establish rules governing whether to receive SS7 packets based on sender destination service requested and so on. Monitoring systems allow operators to diagnose and resolve network failures whether because of security lapses or otherwise. Chapter 16. SS7 Testing When a new implementation of C7 is introduced into a network it must be conformance tested against the appropriate standard to ensure that it functions correctly. This is known as validation testing. Validation testing is performed before the implementation is put into a live network. After validation testing has been successfully completed the implementation can be deployed into the live network where more testing will be performed. Testing at this stage is known as compatibility testing. Compatibility testing ensures that the implementation can interwork properly with the other signaling points that are already in the network it might also be referred to as interoperability testing. The validation phase is performed against an offline implementation and is used for protocol verification whereas compatibility testing is performed against an online implementation and is used to verify the proper interworking of two or more protocol implementations. The ITU-T has produced framework test specifications covering both validation and compatibility for MTP2 MTP3 TUP ISUP ISUP Supplementary Services SCCP and TCAP. The test specifications are contained in Recommendations to respectively. While all tests are validation tests a
