Cache Testing Tool
Caching has been established as a vital mechanism for providing high scalability in modern distributed software systems. Each conventional web browser contains a caching systems which stores and reuses HTTP responses in order to reduce data traffic and communication latency. To prevent web caching systems from returning stale content, the IETF has published the RFC 7234 which specifies caching policies and control directives. Honoring this standard is therefore essential for web caching system in order to provide reliable and fresh content. A violation of the RFC 7234 can lead to the lost of the advantages of caching. Moreover, it can induce also security and privacy issues.
To analyze the compliance of web caching systems to the RFC 7234 as well as customized caching policies, we developed a cache testing tool. This tool contains over 400 test cases for analyzing RFC 7234 requirements, control directives as well as non-compliances which may lead to caching attacks. You can download our tool under the following link:
https://github.com/DASCologne/Cache-Testing-Tool
This tool has been utilized to conduct an empirical analysis on web browser caches, proxy caches and CDNs. This website provides the detailed results of this research work. The study on web browser caches is discussed in the paper Systematic Analysis on web browser caches which has been presented at 2nd edition of the international conference on Web Studies. The evalutation on proxy caches and CDN will be available in the Paper Mind the Cache: Large Scale Analysis of Web Caching which will be presented at the 34rd ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2019).