Test To Destruction - short story (not the Keith Laumer one)

I read a short story in the early 1990s, maybe in one of the Gardner Dozois The Year's Best Science Fiction compendiums, or a similar anthology from that time. Somehow this story has always stuck in my mind, but I haven't been able to find it!

A key theme of the short story was "test to destruction." the earth has been conquered by aliens. They occupy the planet and have a tight grip on society, although there are gaps in their ability to control everything. At the beginning of the story we meet our protagonist, a skilled computer hacker who has been able to operate under the radar and have some amount of freedom from these aliens. Now one of the things these aliens do is "test to destruction." They imprison a human they want to examine/analyze and subject him or her to all sorts of experiments to determine what are the limits of human endurance. Obviously our protagonist wants to avoid this fate. So early in the story he is attempting to enter a city, or perhaps pass a checkpoint of some sort, and he tries to hack his way past some sort of alien firewall/robot. He thinks based on prior experience that he should be able to do so, but fails and is captured. Subsequent to this I don't remember the story well, but he has another encounter with the same firewall/robot and realizes it is "just a peripheral." Somehow, armed with that knowledge he is able to defeat it. And perhaps (though I'm not sure) this leads to the eventual downfall of the invading aliens.

I did some googling for "test to destruction" and found the anthology Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison, in which there is a short story of that name; but that's not the story I read in the early 90s. I also dug through multiple of the Gardner Dozois The Year's Best Science Fiction that I could find from around that time period, but didn't locate the story.

Does anyone know this one??

Possibly The Pardoner's Tale by Robert Silverberg. I read it in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois.

The aliens are referred to as The Entities and we don't learn much about them, or indeed the hacker who remains anonymous. The phrase test to destruction is only used once in full, but is used multiple times as the acronym T.T.D.

The Entities have built walls round the cities, and the hacker is a pardoner, which means he can hack the Entities computers to get you a pass to leave the city and thereby escape the control of the Entities. The robot you remember is an android who poses as a client but attacks and disables the pardoner. The pardoner is given another chance to attack the android and now he realises what it is he manages to severely damage it and the mainframe that it is connected to.