Feedback Control Based Test Case Instantiation for Firewall Testing

Abstract

A firewall’s proper functioning is critical to the network it protects. Thus, a firewall should be tested with respect to its intended security policy. We propose a feedback control based approach for test case generation to detect mismatches between firewall’s expected and executed behavior. In the proposed approach, abstract test cases are generated from firewall decision diagrams and instantiated with the test input values chosen using the proposed feedback control based selection algorithm. A case study is presented to validate the presented approach.