Model-Based Security Testing

TL;DR

This paper surveys model-based security testing (MBST), a systematic approach for specifying, documenting, and automating security test cases, with a focus on recent methods and tools developed in the European DIAMONDS project.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of MBST techniques, models, and emerging methods, highlighting recent developments and industrial relevance.

Findings

MBST enables high-level security test specification and automation.

Recent methods integrate security modeling with test generation.

European DIAMONDS project advances MBST tools and techniques.

Abstract

Security testing aims at validating software system requirements related to security properties like confidentiality, integrity, authentication, authorization, availability, and non-repudiation. Although security testing techniques are available for many years, there has been little approaches that allow for specification of test cases at a higher level of abstraction, for enabling guidance on test identification and specification as well as for automated test generation. Model-based security testing (MBST) is a relatively new field and especially dedicated to the systematic and efficient specification and documentation of security test objectives, security test cases and test suites, as well as to their automated or semi-automated generation. In particular, the combination of security modelling and test generation approaches is still a challenge in research and of high interest for industrial applications. MBST includes e.g. security functional testing, model-based fuzzing, risk- and threat-oriented testing, and the usage of security test patterns. This paper provides a survey on MBST techniques and the related models as well as samples of new methods and tools that are under development in the European ITEA2-project DIAMONDS.