Automated cookie collection testing

Abstract

Cookies are used by over 80% of Web applications utilizing dynamic Web application frameworks. Applications deploying cookies must be rigorously verified to ensure that the application is robust and secure. Given the intense time-to-market pressures faced by modern Web applications, testing strategies that are low cost and automatable are required. Automated Cookie Collection Testing (CCT) is presented, and is empirically demonstrated to be a low-cost and highly effective automated testing solution for modern Web applications. Automatable test oracles and evaluation metrics specifically designed for Web applications are presented, and are shown to be significant diagnostic tests. Automated CCT is shown to detect faults within five real-world Web applications. A case study of over 580 test results for a single application is presented demonstrating that automated CCT is an effective testing strategy. Moreover, CCT is found to detect security bugs in a Web application released into full production.