Security and Robustness by Protocol Testing

Abstract

Network protocols are the basis of network communication, and security concerns about protocol aspects are always important and useful in network systems. For the past two decades, the methods of protocol testing have been used to verify the functional conformance between the network specifications and the implementations. In this paper, we extend protocol testing methods by considering the robustness of the network protocols. We suggest a method for modeling network systems with concurrent components and propose a robustness testing approach to evaluate the system security. A new definition of Glued IOLTS is used to define this kind of system, and an algorithm for robustness test case generation is given. A case study with the RADIUS protocol is presented.