RE: [aus-dotnet] Permission coding

[Corneliu I. Tusnea]

Dylan,

 

You might have seen that in my presentation at CodeCamp or TechEd on security where I was talking also about a nicer approach:

[PrincipalPermission(SecurityAction.Demand, Role="Manager")]

This is a nice way of defining roles required however the concept is not that useful in smart clients applications as you can use a tool like Hawkeye (http://www.acorns.com.au/projects/hawkeye) to change the reported roles on the fly and all your tests (these ones or the ones with IsInRole) become useless.

 

For a smart client it’s very important to realize that this type of role checks should only be used for usability purposes and not for security.

You should be aware that any check that you do it’s easy to modify either at runtime (see Hawkeye) or by modifying the assemblies (decompilation/recompilation).

 

Regards,

Corneliu I. Tusnea
Readify | Senior Consultant

M: +61 410 835 593 | C: corneliu.tusnea@xxxxxxxxxxx

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From: peter@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:peter@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tusler, Dylan
Sent: Thursday, 10 January 2008 4:39 PM
To: dotnet@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [aus-dotnet] Permission coding

 

I remember doing some really exciting stuff around this topic on the advanced .NET course at Readify.

 

Unfortunately I don't have my notes at hand, but I'm sure somebody out there will know what I'm talking about...

 

Dylan.

 

 

---

From: peter@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:peter@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Greg Keogh
Sent: Thursday, 10 January 2008 10:42 AM
To: dotnet@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [aus-dotnet] Permission coding

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Folks,

 

I have previously fallen into the coding trap where your project becomes littered with permission checking code like this:

 

if (IsInRole("Customer"))

{

  panelThing.Visible = true;

  labelOther.Text = "Some other message".

}

 

As an app grows, this sort of tedious code can get out of control, and I want to find a better way of doing this.

CAB uses Action Catalogs for this sort of thing, but I never got around to using them due the clumsiness of implementing them. They seem to use policy injection techniques internally, but I haven’t tried to unravel how they do it to steal the idea.

 

Has anyone fiddled in this sort of coding area? I’m going to run some webs searches on ‘injection security declarative’ keywords to see what turns up.

 

Cheers,

Greg

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