Attack pattern-based combinatorial testing

Abstract

The number of potential security threats rises with the increasing number of web applications, which cause tremendous financial and existential implications for developers and users as well. The biggest challenge for security testing is to specify and implement ways in order to detect potential vulnerabilities of the developed system in a never ending quest against new security threats but also to cover already known ones so that a program is suited against typical attack vectors. For these purposes many approaches have been developed in the area of model-based security testing in order to come up with solutions for real-world application problems. These approaches provide theoretical background as well as practical solutions for certain security issues. In this paper, we partially rely on previous work but focus on the representation of attack patterns using UML state diagrams. We extend previous work in combining the attack pattern models with combinatorial testing in order to provide concrete test input, which is submitted to the system under test. With combinatorial testing we capture different combinations of inputs and thus increasing the likelihood to find weaknesses in the implementation under test that can be exploited. Besides the foundations of our approach we further report on first experiments that indicate its practical use.