Similarity testing for access control

in Information and Software Technology (2014)

Towards a Full Support of Obligations In XACML

Scientific Conference (2014)

Model-Driven Adaptive Delegation

in Masuhara, Hidehiko; Chiba, Sigeru; Ubayashi, Naoyasu (Eds.) Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference companion on Aspect-oriented software development (2013, March)

Model-Driven Security is a specialization of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) that focuses on making security models productive, i.e., enforceable in the final deployment. Among the variety of models that ... [more ▼]

Model-Driven Security is a specialization of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) that focuses on making security models productive, i.e., enforceable in the final deployment. Among the variety of models that have been studied in a MDE perspective, one can mention access control models that specify the access rights. So far, these models mainly focus on static definitions of access control policies, without taking into account the more complex, but essential, delegation of rights mechanism. User delegation is a meta-level mechanism for administrating access rights, which allows a user without any specific administrative privileges to delegate his/her access rights to another user. This paper analyses the main hard-points for introducing various delegation semantics in model-driven security and proposes a model-driven framework for 1) specifying access control, delegation and the business logic as separate concerns; 2) dynamically enforcing/weaving access control policies with various delegation features into security-critical systems; and 3) providing a flexibly dynamic adaptation strategy. We demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed solution through the proof-of-concept implementations of different systems. [less ▲]

Access Control Enforcement Testing

in 8th International Workshop on Automation of Software Test (AST), 2013 (2012, May)

A policy-based access control architecture com- prises Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs), which are modules that intercept subjects access requests and enforce the access decision reached by a Policy ... [more ▼]

A policy-based access control architecture com- prises Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs), which are modules that intercept subjects access requests and enforce the access decision reached by a Policy Decision Point (PDP), the module implementing the access decision logic. In applications, PEPs are generally implemented manually, which can introduce errors in policy enforcement and lead to security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose an approach to systematically test and validate the correct enforcement of access control policies in a given target application. More specifically, we rely on a two folded approach where a static analysis of the target application is first made to identify the sensitive accesses that could be regulated by the policy. The dynamic analysis of the application is then conducted using mutation to verify for every sensitive access whether the policy is correctly enforced. The dynamic analysis of the application also gives the exact location of the PEP to enable fixing enforcement errors detected by the analysis. The approach has been validated using a case study implementing an access control policy. [less ▲]

Refactoring Access Control Policies for Performance Improvement

in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2012) (2012)

In order to facilitate managing authorization, access control architectures are designed to separate the business logic from an access control policy. To determine whether a user can access which ... [more ▼]

In order to facilitate managing authorization, access control architectures are designed to separate the business logic from an access control policy. To determine whether a user can access which resources, a request is formulated from a component, called a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) located in application code. Given a request, a Policy Decision Point (PDP) evaluates the request against an access control policy and returns its access decision (i.e., permit or deny) to the PEP. With the growth of sensitive information for protection in an application, an access control policy consists of a larger number of rules, which often cause a performance bottleneck. To address this issue, we propose to refactor access control policies for performance improvement by splitting a policy (handled by a single PDP) into its corresponding multiple policies with a smaller number of rules (handled by multiple PDPs). We define seven attribute-set-based splitting criteria to facilitate splitting a policy. We have conducted an evaluation on three subjects of reallife Java systems, each of which interacts with access control policies. Our evaluation results show that (1) our approach preserves the initial architectural model in terms of interaction between the business logic and its corresponding rules in a policy, and (2) our approach enables to substantially reduce request evaluation time for most splitting criteria. Copyright 2012 ACM. [less ▲]

Testing Obligation Policy Enforcement using Mutation Analysis

in Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Mutation Analysis (associated to the Fifth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, ICST 2012) (2012)

The support of obligations with access control policies allows the expression of more sophisticated requirements such as usage control, availability and privacy. In order to enable the use of these ... [more ▼]

The support of obligations with access control policies allows the expression of more sophisticated requirements such as usage control, availability and privacy. In order to enable the use of these policies, it is crucial to ensure their correct enforcement and management in the system. For this reason, this paper introduces a set of mutation operators for obligation policies. The paper first identifies key elements in obligation policy management, then presents mutation operators which injects minimal errors which affect these aspects. Test cases are qualified w.r.t. their ability in detecting problems, simulated by mutation, in the interactions between policy management and the application code. The use of policy mutants as substitutes for real flaws enables a first investigation of testing obligation policies in a system. We validate our work by providing an implementation of the mutation process: the experiments conducted on a Java program provide insights for improving test selection. [less ▲]

Model Driven Mutation Applied to Adaptative Systems Testing

in 2011 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (2011)

Dynamically Adaptive Systems modify their behavior and structure in response to changes in their surrounding environment and according to an adaptation logic. Critical systems increasingly incorporate ... [more ▼]

Dynamically Adaptive Systems modify their behavior and structure in response to changes in their surrounding environment and according to an adaptation logic. Critical systems increasingly incorporate dynamic adaptation capabilities, examples include disaster relief and space exploration systems. In this paper, we focus on mutation testing of the adaptation logic. We propose a fault model for adaptation logics that classifies faults into environmental completeness and adaptation correctness. Since there are several adaptation logic languages relying on the same underlying concepts, the fault model is expressed independently from specific adaptation languages. Taking benefit from model-driven engineering technology, we express these common concepts in a metamodel and define the operational semantics of mutation operators at this level. Mutation is applied on model elements and model transformations are used to propagate these changes to a given adaptation policy in the chosen formalism. Preliminary results on an adaptive web server highlight the difficulty of killing mutants for adaptive systems, and thus the difficulty of generating efficient tests. [less ▲]