Currently, eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) has becoming the standard for implementing access control policies and consequently more attention is dedicated to testing the correctness of XACML policies. In particular, coverage measures can be adopted for assessing test strategy effectiveness in exercising the policy elements. This study introduces a set of XACML coverage criteria and describes the access control infrastructure, based on a monitor engine, enabling the coverage criterion selection and the on-line tracing of the testing activity. Examples of infrastructure usage and of assessment of different test strategies are provided.
  The implementation of an authorization system is a critical and error-prone activity that requires a careful verification and testing process. As a matter of fact, errors in the authorization system code could grant accesses that should instead be denied, thus jeopardizing the security of the protected system. In this paper, we address the testing of the implementation of the Policy Decision Point (PDP) within the PolPA authorization system that enables history-based and usage-based control of accesses. Accordingly, we propose two testing strategies specifically conceived for validating the history-based access control and the usage control functionalities of the PolPA PDP. The former is based on a fault model able to highlight the problems and vulnerabilities that could occur during the PDP implementation. The latter combines the standard technique for conditions coverage with a methodology for simulating the continuous control of the PDP during the runtime execution. Both strategies are implemented within a testing framework supporting the automatic generation and execution of security test suites. Results produced by the application of this testing framework to a real case study are presented. 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 code-based mutation operators to the PDP.  A widely adopted security mechanism is the specification of access control policies by means of the XACML language. In this paper, we propose a framework, called X-CREATE, for the systematic generation of test inputs (XACML requests). Differently from existing tools, XCREATE exploits the XACML Context Schema. In particular, the tool applies a XML-based methodology (XPT) to systematically produce a set of intermediate instances, covering the XACML Context Schema. Moreover, for request generation, X-CREATE applies a procedure for parsing the policy under test and assigning values to the generated intermediate instances. The aim of the proposed framework is twofold: testing of policy evaluation engines and testing of access control policies. The experimental results show that the fault detection effectiveness of X-CREATE is similar or higher than that of existing approaches. Access control policies are usually specified by the XACML language. However, policy definition could be an error prone process, because of the many constraints and rules that have to be specified. In order to increase the confidence on defined XACML policies, an accurate testing activity could be a valid solution. The typical policy testing is performed by deriving specific test cases, i.e. XACML requests, that are executed by means of a PDP implementation, so to evidence possible security lacks or problems. Thus the fault detection effectiveness of derived test suite is a fundamental property. To evaluate the performance of the applied test strategy and consequently of the test suite, a commonly adopted methodology is using mutation testing. In this paper, we propose two different methodologies for deriving XACML requests, that are defined independently from the policy under test. The proposals exploit the values of the XACML policy for better customizing the generated requests and providing a more effective test suite. The proposed methodologies have been compared in terms of their fault detection effectiveness by the application of mutation testing on a set of real policies. The trustworthiness of sensitive data needs to be guaranteed and testing is a common activity among privacy protection solutions, even if quite expensive. Accesses to data and resources are ruled by the policy decision point (PDP), which relies on the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) standard language for specifying access rights. In this study, the authors propose a testing strategy for automatically deriving test requests from a XACML policy and describe their pilot experience in test automation using this strategy. Considering a real two-level PDP implemented for health data security, the authors compare the effectiveness of the test plan automatically derived with the one derived by a standard manual testing process.