Security Testing: A Survey

Identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring security functionality by security testing is a widely applied measure to evaluate and improve the security of software. Due to the openness of modern software-based systems, applying appropriate security testing techniques is of growing importance and essential to perform effective and efficient security testing. Therefore, an overview of actual security testing techniques is of high value both for researchers to evaluate and refine the techniques and for practitioners to apply and disseminate them. This chapter fulfills this need and provides an overview of recent security testing techniques. For this purpose, it first summarize the required background of testing and security engineering. Then, basics and recent developments of security testing techniques applied during the secure software development lifecycle, i.e., model-based security testing, code-based testing and static analysis, penetration testing and dynamic analysis, as well as security regression testing are discussed. Finally, the security testing techniques are illustrated by adopting them for an example three-tiered web-based business application

Coverage-based Test Cases Selection for XACML Policies

XACML is the de facto standard for implementing access control policies. Testing the correctness of policies is a critical task. The test of XACML policies involves running requests and checking manually the correct response. It is therefore important to reduce the manual test effort by automatically selecting the most important requests to be tested. This paper introduces the XACML smart coverage selection approach, based on a proposed XACML policy coverage criterion. The approach is evaluated using mutation analysis and is compared on the one side with a not-reduced test suite, on the other with random and greedy optimal test selection approaches. We performed the evaluation on a set of six real world policies. The results show that our selection approach can reach good mutation scores, while significantly reducing the number of tests to be run