Assessment of Access Control Systems Using Mutation Testing

Abstract

In modern pervasive applications, it is important to validate access control mechanisms that are usually defined by means of the standard XACML language. Mutation analysis has been applied on access control policies for measuring the adequacy of a test suite. In this paper, we present a testing framework aimed at applying mutation analysis at the level of the Java based policy evaluation engine. A set of Java based mutation operators is selected and applied to the code of the Policy Decision Point (PDP). A first experiment shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework in assessing the fault detection of XACML test suites and confirms the efficacy of the application of codebased mutation operators to the PDP.

An automated framework for continuous development and testing of access control systems

“…The mutation testing approach adopted in XMF and implemented in this component has been inspired by the seminal work of Daoudagh et al 17 Thus, adopting the idea that mutation technique is an effective way to assess the fault detection effectiveness of the different test strategies, instead of applying the mutations to the security policies as in Daoudagh et al, 17 here, the target is to apply mutation operators directly at the level of policy evaluation engine, that is, the PDP. The underling motivation is that even the mutation operators at policy level can be a quite effective means for simulating the most common faults of the XACML policy specification, however, due to the complexity of the PDP implementation and the specific characteristics of its implementation language, the proposed mutations do not exhaustively cover all the important criticalities of the PDP specification.…”

Boosting a Low-Cost Smart Home Environment with Usage and Access Control Rules

“…Finally, considering the use of monitoring engine for access control assessment, several general-purpose monitoring proposals are currently available, which can be mainly divided into two groups: those that are embedded in the execution engine (e.g., [ 49 , 50 ]) and those that can be integrated into the execution framework as an additional component (e.g., [ 8 , 51 , 52 ]). Both types of solutions have specific advantages.…”

On‐line tracing of XACML‐based policy coverage criteria

“…The policy adopted in this experiment (called Policy 1 in this paper) is a (Figure 3). It includes a policy set target (line 3) that is empty; a policy target (lines [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] allowing the access only to the books resource; a first rule (ruleA) (lines 19-36) with a target (lines 20-35) specifying that this rule applies only to the access requests of a read action of books resource with any environment; a second rule (ruleB) (lines 40-55), which effect is Deny when the subject is "Julius", the action is "write", the resource and environment are any resource and any environment respectively; a third rule (ruleC) (lines 59-81) that allows to subject "Julius" the action "write", if he is also "professor" or "administrator"; finally, the default rule (line 85) denies the access in the other cases.…”

“…Considering the automated test cases generation, solutions have been proposed for testing either the XACML policy or the PDP implementation [10, 19, 20]. Among them, the most referred ones are the Targen tool [21], the proposal of [22] and the already mentioned X‐CREATE tool [6, 10, 11].…”

“…Finally, concerning the adoption of monitoring facilities for coverage assessment, the work in [3] represents a preliminary attempt of an infrastructure for enabling coverage criterion selection and policy coverage assessment analysis. Several general‐purpose monitoring proposals are currently available, which can be mainly divided into two groups: those that are embedded in the execution engine such as [20, 23] and those that can be integrated into the execution framework as an additional component such as for instance [24]. Among the additional monitor facility in this paper, we refer to the monitoring framework called Glimpse [9], which is extremely flexible and adaptable to various scenarios and service oriented architecture (SOA) architecture patterns.…”