Example: Authentication Test Case

Often when monitoring applications and services via SaaS, whether in-house or in the cloud, you’ll need to log in to prove you’re allowed to use that particular service. And of course, logging in means that you’ll need private credentials like a user name and password.

When building a test case in Alyvix, where do you store those credentials, and how are you going to retrieve them when you need them, while keeping them secure?

Alyvix stores its test cases in an open file format, with the full specification published in this guide. So if someone manages to obtain your test case files, they could then look at anything in them, including those credentials. Alyvix provides a method to encrypt credentials so that they can be stored and decrypted securely, when needed.

Let’s start by creating a simple test case that logs in to www.dropbox.com with our credentials and then logs out again, using the best practices described in this previous tutorial.

Prepare using Alyvix Cipher

Before starting the test case build, let’s encrypt our credentials so they’re ready to use. We’ll make up a private key (remember to keep it securely locked away, and not on the same computer that the test case runs on), and use it as one of the arguments to the alyvix_cipher command command. We’ll just have to do this once for each credential, regardless of how many test cases it’s used in.

C:\Alyvix\testcases> alyvix_cipher -e <text_string_to_encrypt> -k <private_key>

Suppose we create the private key i_like_alyvix to encrypt the two credentials my_user_name and my_password. Then we would run the cipher command twice as follows, producing two ciphers that we’ll copy later into the credential fields:

C:\Alyvix\testcases> alyvix_cipher -e my_user_name -k i_like_alyvix
+HGl7XV2mdTFvWLpr9CtVQ==
C:\Alyvix\testcases> alyvix_cipher -e my_password -k i_like_alyvix
bS1boKctW64yZ1dG1iz2ZA==

The cipher command is deterministic, so if you give it the same credential and same private key, it will produce the same cipher. When it’s time to build the relevant test case step, just use the cipher returned by the command above as if that value were the real credential, and Alyvix will decrypt it automatically when the test case runs, inserting the original value.

Note that the == at the end of the cipher is what tells Alyvix that it is a cipher.

Initial Build Steps

Now that our ciphers are ready, let’s start building our test case:

1. From a blank desktop

Repeat steps #1-4 in the previous tutorial to launch the web browser, but using www.dropbox.com instead of www.visittrentino.it as the web app address. Once the page loads you should see this at the top:

2. The login button

Now let’s add a new step that clicks on the login button once the web page has loaded. Highlight an anchor (an image near the top left of the page like the Dropbox logo that you know will always be in the same location) and the Login button, then add a Click action to the Login button:

3. The login page

When that step runs, it will take us to the login page where we can enter our user name:

Then we show Alyvix how to click on the account field, type the user name cipher we created above into the String field, and click on the Continue button.

4. Entering the password

When that runs, a second page appears where we can enter the password, and we do the same thing with the password cipher in its String field:

5. Measure and log out

You can now run whatever task you like within the web app (here, Dropbox) and measure the results as we did in the previous example test case. For instance, you can measure how much time it takes for the landing page to appear, effectively measuring how long the login process took.

When the task you’re monitoring is done, you’ll need to log out so that the next time you run the test case, it will show the login page rather than launch the main app at the landing page without ever asking for a login.

The typical logout procedure at this point is to click to open the Account menu, and then a second click to actually log out. That’s two whole steps. But we can actually do this in one step if we note that all that the logout button does is call the URL https://www.dropbox.com/logout:

So instead, let’s just add a step to insert that URL directly into your browser’s URL bar. This step should locate the bar, click on it, and then have Alyvix type in the string https://www.dropbox.com/logout{enter} into the bar. The {enter} part tells Alyvix to press the Enter key after it has typed in that string, which will cause the browser to load that URL (curly braces indicate a special key to Alyvix).

That logs you out, so finally you can kill the browser as described in Step #6 in the previous tutorial and everything will be left in the same state that we started with, allowing you to repeatedly run the test case for monitoring scenarios.

You can now follow the procedure above to create and insert ciphers no matter how many encrypted strings you need, and you won’t have to worry that someone will steal your stored credentials.