Security Testing: A Survey

by Michael Felderer, Matthias Büchlein, Martin Johns, Achim D. Brucker, Ruth Breu, and Alexander Pretschner

Identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring security functionality by security testing is a widely applied measure to evaluate and improve the security of software. Due to the openness of modern software-based systems, applying appropriate security testing techniques is of growing importance and essential to perform effective and efficient security testing. Therefore, an overview of actual security testing techniques is of high value both for researchers to evaluate and refine the techniques and for practitioners to apply and disseminate them. This chapter fulfills this need and provides an overview of recent security testing techniques. For this purpose, it first summarize the required background of testing and security engineering. Then, basics and recent developments of security testing techniques applied during the secure software development lifecycle, i.e., model-based security testing, code-based testing and static analysis, penetration testing and dynamic analysis, as well as security regression testing are discussed. Finally, the security testing techniques are illustrated by adopting them for an example three-tiered web-based business application.

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QR Code for felderer.ea:security-testing:2015.Please cite this article as follows:
Michael Felderer, Matthias Büchlein, Martin Johns, Achim D. Brucker, Ruth Breu, and Alexander Pretschner. Security Testing: A Survey. In Advances in Computers, 101, 2015.
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BibTeX
@Article{ felderer.ea:security-testing:2015,
abstract = {Identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring security functionality by security testing is a widely applied measure to evaluate and improve the security of software. Due to the openness of modern software-based systems, applying appropriate security testing techniques is of growing importance and essential to perform effective and efficient security testing. Therefore, an overview of actual security testing techniques is of high value both for researchers to evaluate and refine the techniques and for practitioners to apply and disseminate them. This chapter fulfills this need and provides an overview of recent security testing techniques. For this purpose, it first summarize the required background of testing and security engineering. Then, basics and recent developments of security testing techniques applied during the secure software development lifecycle, i.e., model-based security testing, code-based testing and static analysis, penetration testing and dynamic analysis, as well as security regression testing are discussed. Finally, the security testing techniques are illustrated by adopting them for an example three-tiered web-based business application.},
author = {Michael Felderer and Matthias B{\"u}chlein and Martin Johns and Achim D. Brucker and Ruth Breu and Alexander Pretschner},
journal = {Advances in Computers},
language = {USenglish},
mypdf = {https://www.brucker.ch/bibliography/download/2015/felderer.ea-security-testing-2015.pdf},
num_pages = {43},
title = {Security Testing: A Survey},
url = {https://www.brucker.ch/bibliography/abstract/felderer.ea-security-testing-2015},
volume = {101},
year = {2015},
}