Role-based access control is an important access control method for securing computer systems. A role-based access control policy can be implemented incorrectly due to various reasons, such as programming errors. Defects in the implementation may lead to unauthorized access and security breaches. To reveal access control defects, this paper presents a model-based approach to automated generation of executable access control tests using predicate/transition nets. Role-permission test models are built by integrating declarative access control rules with functional test models or contracts (preconditions and postconditions) of the associated activities (the system functions). The access control tests are generated automatically from the test models to exercise the interactions of access control activities. They are transformed into executable code through a model-implementation mapping that maps the modeling elements to implementation constructs. The approach has been implemented in an industry-adopted test automation framework that supports the generation of test code in a variety of languages. The full model-based testing process has been applied to three systems implemented in Java. The effectiveness is evaluated through mutation analysis of role-based access control rules. The experiments show that the model-based approach is highly effective in detecting the seeded access control defects.

The world's increased dependence on software-enabled systems has raised major concerns about software reliability and security. New cost-effective tools for software quality assurance are needed. This paper presents an automated test generation technique, called Model-based Integration and System Test Automation (MISTA), for integrated functional and security testing of software systems. Given a Model-Implementation Description (MID) specification, MISTA generates test code that can be executed immediately with the implementation under test. The MID specification uses a high-level Petri net to capture both control- and data-related requirements for functional testing, access control testing, or penetration testing with threat models. After generating test cases from the test model according to a given criterion, MISTA converts the test cases into executable test code by mapping model-level elements into implementation-level constructs. MISTA has implemented test generators for various test coverage criteria of test models, code generators for various programming and scripting languages, and test execution environments such as Java, C, C++, C#, HTML-Selenium IDE, and Robot Framework. MISTA has been applied to the functional and security testing of various real-world software systems. Our experiments have demonstrated that MISTA can be highly effective in fault detection.

Access control policies in software systems can be implemented incorrectly for various reasons. This paper presents a model-based approach for automated testing of access control implementation. To feed the model-based testing process, test models are constructed by integrating declarative access control rules and contracts (preconditions and post-conditions) of the associated activities. The access control tests are generated from the test models to exercise the interactions of access control activities. Test executability is obtained through a mapping of the modeling elements to implementation constructs. The approach has been implemented in an industry-adopted test automation framework that supports the generation of test code in a variety of languages, such as Java, C, C++, C#, and HTML/Selenium IDE. The full model-based testing process has been applied to two systems implemented in Java. The effectiveness is evaluated in terms of access-control fault detection rate using mutation analysis of access control implementation. The experiments show that the model-based tests killed 99.7% of the mutants and the remaining mutants caused no policy violations.