The X-CREATE framework: a comparison of XACML policy testing strategies

The specification of access control policies with the XACML language could be an error prone process, so a testing is usually the solution for increasing the confidence on the policy itself. In this paper, we compare two methodologies for deriving test cases for policy testing, i.e. XACML requests, that are implemented in the X-CREATE tool. We consider a simple combinatorial strategy and a XML-based approach (XPT) which exploit policy values and the XACML Context Schema. A stopping criterion for the test cases generation is also provided and used for the comparison of the strategies in terms of fault detection effectiveness.