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.

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.

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.

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.