Funding information: This work was partially supported by the project project SERICS (PE00000014) under the NRRP MUR program funded by the NextGenerationEU. Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2025 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

Search and rescue operations are critical and involve logistical and human infrastructures, requiring high technology trustworthiness. A multi-layer secure architecture on top of a drone mesh is presented to address these challenges. It is leveraged by security features such as blockchain and CIA-compliant communication paradigms.

The continuous advancements in IoT (Internet of Things) have various benefits. It has opened new horizons for the industrial revolution in the 21st century. Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 also promote using IoT devices to build better and more productive autonomous systems. The behaviour of these complex software systems evolves as they are augmented with the physical and security of IoT devices. IoT-security security and privacy benchmark systems have recently caused a financial loss in various industrial sectors. More importantly, it has damaged the trust of people in technology and IoT systems and people's distrust towards IoT, motivating rediscovering IoT cybersecurity from a brother perspective. The paper aims to enhance security and privacy by design methodology and provides an overview of the issues and challenges in cybersecurity testing. We also proposed a Cybersecurity Testing Framework (CTF) to enhance IoT cybersecurity that will help to resolve significant security and privacy challenges related to Industry 5.0.

Abstract Automated testing in DevOps represents a key factor for providing fast release of new software features assuring quality delivery. In this paper, we introduce DOXAT, an automated framework for continuous development and testing of access control mechanisms based on the XACML standard. It leverages mutation analysis for the selection and assessment of the test strategies and provides automated facilities for test oracle definition, test execution, and results analysis, in order to speedup and automate the Plan, Code, Build, and Test phases of DevOps process. We show the usage of the framework during the planning and testing phases of the software development cycle of a PDP example.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is changing how Personal Data should be processed. Using Access Control Systems (ACSs) and their specific policies as practical means for assuring a by-design lawfully compliance with the privacy-preserving rules and provision is currently an increasingly researched topic. As a result, this newly born research field raises several research questions and paves the way for different solutions. This position paper would like to provide an overview of research challenges and questions concerning activities for analyzing, designing, implementing, and testing Access Control mechanisms (systems and policies) to guarantee compliance with the GDPR. Some possible answers to the open issues and future research directions and topics are also provided.

This paper presents a privacy-by-design solution based on Consent Manager (CM) and Access Control (AC) to aid organizations to comply with the GDPR. The idea is to start from the GDPR's text, transform it into a machine-readable format through a given CM, and then convert the obtained outcome to a set of enforceable Access Control Policies (ACPs). As a result, we have defined a layered architecture that makes any given system privacy-aware, i.e., systems that are compliant by-design with the GDPR. Furthermore, we have provided a proof-of-concept by integrating a Consent Manager coming from an industrial context and an AC Manager coming from academia.

Context: Systems Of Systems (SoSs) are becoming a widespread emerging architecture, and they are used in several daily life contexts. Therefore, when a new device is integrated into an existing SoS, facilities able to efficaciously assess and prevent anomalous and dangerous situations are necessary. Objective: The aim is to define a reference environment conceived for monitoring and assessing the behavior of SoS when a new device is added. Method: In this paper, we present MENTORS, a monitoring environment for SoS. MENTORS is based on semantic web technologies to formally represent SoS and Monitoring knowledge through a core ontology, called MONTOLOGY. Results and Conclusion: We defined the conceptual model of MENTORS, which is composed of two phases: Off-line and On-line, supported by a reference architecture that allows its (semi-)automation. Validation of the proposal with real use-cases is part of future activities.

This paper presents a Controlled Experiment (CE) for assessing testing strategies in the context of Access Control (AC); more precisely, the CE is performed by considering the AC Systems (ACSs) based on the XACML Standard. We formalized the goal of the CE, and we assessed two available test cases generation strategies in terms of three metrics: Effectiveness, Size and Average Percentage Faults Detected (APFD). The experiment operation is described and the main results are analyzed.

In ICT systems and modern applications access control systems are important mechanisms for managing resources and data access. Their criticality requires high security levels and consequently, the application of effective and efficient testing approaches. In this paper we propose standardized guidelines for correctly and systematically performing the testing process in order to avoid errors and improve the effectiveness of the validation. We focus in particular on Controlled Experiments, and we provide here a characterization of the first three steps of the experiment process (i.e., Scoping, Planning and Operation) by the adoption of the Goal- Question-Metric template. The specialization of the three phases is provided through a concrete example.

While great emphasis is given in the current literature about the potential of leveraging the cloud for testing purposes, the authors have scarce factual evidence from real‐world industrial contexts about the motivations, drawbacks and benefits related to the adoption of automated cloud testing technology. In this study, the authors present an empirical study undertaken within the ongoing European Project ElasTest, which has developed an open source platform for end‐to‐end testing of large distributed systems. This study aims at validating the ElasTest solution, and consists of the assessment of four demonstrators belonging to different application domains, namely e‐commerce, 5G networking, WebRTC and Internet of Things. For each demonstrator, they collected differing requirements, and achieved varying results, both positive and negative, showing that cloud testing needs careful assessment before adoption.

The research and industrial environments are struggling to identify practical approaches to highlight the (new) duties of controllers of personal data and foster the transition of IT-based systems, services, and tools to comply with the GDPR. In this paper, we present a solution for enhancing the modelling of business processes with facilities to help evaluate the compliance with the GDPR. The proposal is based on a model describing the constituents of the data protection domain: A structured form of the legal text, an ontology of data protection concepts, and a machine-readable translation of the GDPR provisions. An example of application is also provided.

In distributed environments, information security is a key factor and access control is an important means to guarantee confidentiality of sensitive and valuable data. In this paper, we introduce a new decentralized framework for testing of XACML-based access control engines. The proposed framework is composed of different web services and provides the following functionalities: I) generation of test cases based on combinatorial testing strategies; ii) decentralized oracle that associates the expected result to a given test case, i.e. an XACML request; and finally, iii) a GUI for interacting with the framework and providing some analysis about the expected results. A first validation confirms the efficiency of the proposed approach.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)'s sixth principle, Integrity and Confidentiality, dictates that personal data must be protected from unauthorised or unlawful processing. To this aim, we propose a systematic approach for authoring access control policies that are by-design aligned with the provisions of the GDPR. We exemplify it by considering realistic use cases.

The introduction of new generation ICT systems into vehicles makes them highly connected with the external World. As drawback, vehicle becomes potentially vulnerable to security attacks. Here, we consider a scenario in which Vehicular Networks and a Urban Network work together to realize a defence mechanism based on Reputation Systems. In this way, we are able to identify and isolate possible malicious vehicles acting that could send messages with the aim of reducing the availability of the network. We propose Context Aware Reputation Systems, CARS, able to identify insider attackers and isolate them taking into account contextual conditions derived from sensors spread along the entire urban network. Then, we experimentally evaluate CARS on a real data-set of mobility traces of taxis in Rome to compare the proposed systems with existing ones that do not consider contextual conditions. The preliminary results obtained are promising and show the feasibility and potentiality of CARS.

Cloud computing offers scalable and efficient information sharing and storage resources. However, the risk of security breaches for personal and private data in this computing environment is very high. Access control is among the most adopted means to assure that sensible information or resources are correctly accessed. This paper provides an overview of main access control models in cloud infrastructures discussing most important challenges. In particular, focusing on access control policy specification, analysis, verification and enforcement, we also identify some emerging issues and point out some solutions and future research directions for cloud computing.

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.

Model-based simulation and monitoring are becoming part of advanced learning environments. In this paper, we propose a model-based simulation and monitoring framework for management of learning assessment and we describe its architecture and main functionalities. The proposed framework allows user-friendly learning simulation with a strong support for collaboration and social interactions. Moreover, it monitors the learners' behavior during simulation execution and it is able to compute the learning scores useful for the learner knowledge assessment. The preliminary experimental feedback of the evaluation of the simulation and monitoring framework inside a real environment is also reported.

In model-driven learning, simulation of Business Process is a key step for improving the learners's skills and enhancing teaching performance. In this paper, we provide the architectural design and the main functionalities of a model-based learning simulation framework. The main objectives of the proposed framework are: i) enable user-friendly learning simulation with a strong support for collaboration and social interactions; ii) provide a process-driven learning environment that allows emulation of the learner behavior when no learners are available to be involved on the simulation; iii) include event-based monitoring aiming at providing feedbacks for the learner assessment.

In access control systems, aimed at regulating the accesses to protected data and resources, a critical component is the Policy Decision Point (PDP), which grants or denies the access according to the defined policies. Due to the complexity of the standard languag-e, it is recommended to rely on model-driven approaches which allow to overcome difficulties in the XACML policy definition. We provide in this paper a toolchain that involves a model-driven approach to specify and generate XACML policies and also enables automated testing of the PDP component. We use XACML-based testing strategies for generating appropriate test cases which are able to validate the functional aspects, constraints, permissions and prohibitions of the PDP. An experimental assessment of the toolchain and its use on a realistic case study are also presented.

In modern pervasive application domains, such as Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems, security aspects are critical. Justified confidence in the security mechanisms that are implemented for assuring proper data access is a key point. In the last years XACML has become the de facto standard for specifying policies for access control decisions in many application domains. Briefly, an XACML policy defines the constraints and conditions that a subject needs to comply with for accessing a resource and doing an action in a given environment. Due to the complexity of the language, XACML policy specification is a difficult and error prone process that requires specific knowledge and a high effort to be properly managed.

Monitoring is essential to validate the runtime behaviour of dynamic distributed systems. However, monitors can inform of relevant events as they occur, but by their very nature they will not report about all those events that are not happening. In service-oriented applications it would be desirable to have means to assess the thoroughness of the interactions among the services that are being monitored. In case some events or message sequences or interaction patterns have not been observed for a while, in fact, one could timely check whether this happens because something is going wrong. In this paper, we introduce the novel notion of monitoring adequacy, which is generic and can be defined on different entities. We then define two adequacy criteria for service compositions and implement a proof-of-concept adequate monitoring framework. We validate the approach on two case studies, the Travel Reservation System and the Future Market choreographies.

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.

Currently, software testing is mainly carried on independently from software architecture-related information. Some approaches propose to perform integration and regression testing with respect to software architecture descriptions, but less attention has been paid to analysing software architecture in order to develop a less costly and time-consuming test plan that covers the requirements of the system of interest. If on one side, it is well known that providing an effective test plan is crucial to software quality, on the other side software testing is extremely difficult because it stems from the complexity of current software systems.

Web services (WSs) are the W3C-endorsed realization of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Since they are supposed to be implementation-neutral, WSs are typically tested black-box at their interface. Such an interface is generally specified in an XML-based notation called the WS Description Language (WSDL). Conceptually, these WSDL documents are eligible for fully automated WS test generation using syntax-based testing approaches. Towards such goal, we introduce the WS-TAXI framework, in which we combine the coverage of WS operations with data-driven test generation. In this paper we present an early-stage implementation of WS-TAXI, obtained by the integration of two existing softwares: soapUI, a popular tool for WS testing, and TAXI, an application we have previously developed for the automated derivation of XML instances from a XML schema. WS-TAXI delivers a complete suite of test messages ready for execution. Test generation is driven by basic coverage criteria and by the application of some heuristics. The application of WS-TAXI to a real case study gave encouraging results.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. Fueling that growth is the availability of independent web services that can be cost-effectively composed with other services to provide richer functionality. The reasons that make these systems easier to build, however, also make them more challenging to test. Independent web services usually provide just an interface, enough to invoke them and develop some general (black-box) tests, but insufficient for a tester to develop an adequate understanding of the integration quality between the application and independent web services. To address this lack we propose a "whitening" approach to make web services more transparent through the addition of an intermediate coverage service. The approach, named Service Oriented Coverage Testing (SOCT), provides a tester with feedback about how a whitened service, called a Testable Service, is exercised. In this paper we introduce the SOCT approach, implement an instance of it, and perform a preliminary study to show its feasibility and potential value. SOCT enables SOA white-box testing, while maintaining SOA flexibility, dynamism and loose coupling.