One of the trickiest, and yet most important, areas of testing web sites is the security. Testing these schemes is one of the core goals of the SimpleTest web tester.

Basic HTTP authentication

If you fetch a page protected by basic authentication then rather than receiving content, you will instead get a 401 header. We can illustrate this with this test...

class AuthenticationTest extends WebTestCase {
    function test401Header() {
        $this->get('http://www.lastcraft.com/protected/');
        $this->showHeaders();
    }
}

HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 19:25:18 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="SimpleTest basic authentication"
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

class AuthenticationTest extends WebTestCase {
    function test401Header() {
        $this->get('http://www.lastcraft.com/protected/');
        $this->assertAuthentication('Basic');
        $this->assertResponse(401);
        $this->assertRealm('SimpleTest basic authentication');
    }
}

Most of the time we are not interested in testing the authentication itself, but want to get past it to test the pages underneath. As soon as the challenge has been issued we can reply with an authentication response...

class AuthenticationTest extends WebTestCase {
    function testAuthentication() {
        $this->get('http://www.lastcraft.com/protected/');
        $this->authenticate('Me', 'Secret');
        $this->assertTitle(...);
    }
}

You can shortcut this step further by encoding the log in details straight into the URL...

class AuthenticationTest extends WebTestCase {
    function testCanReadAuthenticatedPages() {
        $this->get('http://Me:Secret@www.lastcraft.com/protected/');
        $this->assertTitle(...);
    }
}

Only basic authentication is currently supported and this is only really secure in tandem with HTTPS connections. This is usually enough to protect test server from prying eyes, however. Digest authentication and NTLM authentication may be added in the future.

Cookies

Basic authentication doesn't give enough control over the user interface for web developers. More likely this functionality will be coded directly into the web architecture using cookies and complicated timeouts.

Starting with a simple log-in form...

<form>
    Username:
    <input type="text" name="u" value="" /><br />
    Password:
    <input type="password" name="p" value="" /><br />
    <input type="submit" value="Log in" />
</form>

Let's suppose that in fetching this page a cookie has been set with a session ID. We are not going to fill the form in yet, just test that we are tracking the user. Here is the test...

class LogInTest extends WebTestCase {
    function testSessionCookieSetBeforeForm() {
        $this->get('http://www.my-site.com/login.php');
        $this->assertCookie('SID');
    }
}

The rest of the test would be the same as any other form, but we might want to confirm that we still have the same cookie after log-in as before we entered. We wouldn't want to lose track of this after all. Here is a possible test for this...

class LogInTest extends WebTestCase {
    ...
    function testSessionCookieSameAfterLogIn() {
        $this->get('http://www.my-site.com/login.php');
        $session = $this->getCookie('SID');
        $this->setField('u', 'Me');
        $this->setField('p', 'Secret');
        $this->clickSubmit('Log in');
        $this->assertWantedPattern('/Welcome Me/');
        $this->assertCookie('SID', $session);
    }
}

We could even attempt to spoof our own system by setting arbitrary cookies to gain access...

class LogInTest extends WebTestCase {
    ...
    function testSessionCookieSameAfterLogIn() {
        $this->get('http://www.my-site.com/login.php');
        $this->setCookie('SID', 'Some other session');
        $this->get('http://www.my-site.com/restricted.php');
        $this->assertWantedPattern('/Access denied/');
    }
}

Browser sessions

If you are testing an authentication system a critical piece of behaviour is what happens when a user logs back in. We would like to simulate closing and reopening a browser...

class LogInTest extends WebTestCase {
    ...
    function testLoseAuthenticationAfterBrowserClose() {
        $this->get('http://www.my-site.com/login.php');
        $this->setField('u', 'Me');
        $this->setField('p', 'Secret');
        $this->clickSubmit('Log in');
        $this->assertWantedPattern('/Welcome Me/');
        
        $this->restart();
        $this->get('http://www.my-site.com/restricted.php');
        $this->assertWantedPattern('/Access denied/');
    }
}

Expiring cookies can be a problem. After all, if you have a cookie that expires after an hour, you don't want to stall the test for an hour while the cookie passes it's timeout.

To push the cookies over the hour limit you can age them before you restart the session...

class LogInTest extends WebTestCase {
    ...
    function testLoseAuthenticationAfterOneHour() {
        $this->get('http://www.my-site.com/login.php');
        $this->setField('u', 'Me');
        $this->setField('p', 'Secret');
        $this->clickSubmit('Log in');
        $this->assertWantedPattern('/Welcome Me/');
        
        $this->ageCookies(3600);
        $this->restart();
        $this->get('http://www.my-site.com/restricted.php');
        $this->assertWantedPattern('/Access denied/');
    }
}