I have a usermanagement table into my sql server 2008 i want to check each user with their particular role frm my database & not from asp.net predefined database. please help me with the code for the same. also what i need to change into my web config file.
You probably want to implement (roll your own) version of the membership provider to make this job easier, more secure and less error prone - it will also save you writing tons of additional plumbing code.
In essence it means implementing the IIdentity and IPrincipal interfaces (Sounds scary but its really not that bad). See this blog here http://www.bradygaster.com/custom-authentication-with-mvc-3.0 for a step by step guide. Additionally it is worth reading the comments and links to enable proper Forms Authentication via Auth Cookie rather than the basic session management referenced directly in the post!.
Also note this example on the blog is for MVC 3 BUT its equally applicable to Web Forms projects too.
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I'm implementing my frist web application on asp.net mvc 4 and I need to differentiate my users according to roles ( show certain menus to some roles and hide them from others) basically what i want is to manage my users and roles. I understand that security is quite an important part of my application so I don't want to risk it by implementing something not secure while there are other options for doing this.
My question is, is there something already built on MVC 4? is it apropiate for my a small site? ( I don't expect more than 50 concurrent users) is it better to implement my own user administrator? if so, where can I start? so far what I've found is the membership provider but it seems quite big for what i need, there will be no user registration instead the new users will be added by system admins.
Thanks for taking the time for reading this, any feedback will be appreciated!
I would have recommended the default membership provider as it makes use of security industry best practices (i.e. salted hash). However, if that seems overkill, there is a simpler membership provider called SimpleMembership Provider
You can use New ASP.NET Universal Providers (updated version of legacy Membership Provider).
It can be used in small application as well as large application (if you application continues to grow).
Password is encrypted with salt, so it cannot be compromise easily.
Follow the Scott Hanselman's link and see the demo. You will see how easy to set up.
I just discovered ASP.net uses its own profile system to register users and there seems to be a lot of features available as bonus with it (such as secure authentication). However it seems rather specific to have such a feature for a general purpose development environment and things which work in the background the way the profiles system does without me really knowing how (like where the user data is stored) kind of scares me.
Is it worth developing a website which requires user authentication using the asp.net profile system or would it be better to develop my own using SQL databases and such? I'm not going to avoid using SQL anyway, even if I use profiles I'll use the profiles unique ID to identify user data in the SQL table so in that sense I'm not going to avoid using SQL for user information at all.
My favorite thing about profiles is that you can create custom permissions in Web.config files using them () and avoid having to type in the same code to the top of all your aspx source files to do the authentication check.
The other thing I kind of like about it is that security is built in with secure authentication cookies, so I wouldn't have to deal with them myself.
But it doesn't seem like that big of a deal really. I'm just confused as to where profiles stand as far as ASP.Net development goes and what they're designed to accomplish.
The Profile/Membership and Role provider API is very intertwined, and specifies things very narrowly. The benefit is that there is little you have to do to get a lot of functionality working. The disadvantage is when what you need doesn't match what is provided. Nevertheless, there are many potential gotcha's that the API takes care of for you that it really does make sense to use it, at least for authentication.
My needs did not match what the API provided, and I really only needed the Membership portion. The problem is that I had a piece where I needed to use the same authentication and authorization across a web application and a desktop application. My needs are pretty unique, but it's designed for a classroom setting.
Getting the membership to work for my needs wasn't that difficult. I just had to implement the Membership API. There are several features I just didn't need with the Membership API like self-registration, etc. Of course this did present me with a challenge for role management. Typically, as long as your user object implements IPrinciple it can be used directly--but there are serialization issues with the development web server Visual Studio packages if your user class is not defined in the same assembly. Those problems deal with serialization, and your choices include putting the object in the GAC or handle cross-appdomain serialization yourself with objects that are in the GAC like GenericPrincipal and GenericIdentity. That latter option is what I had to do.
Bottom line is that if you don't mind letting the API do all the management for you, than it will work just fine. It is a bit of smart engineering work, and attempts to force you down a route with decent security practices. I've worked with a number of different authentication/authorization APIs (most were not CLR based), and the API does feel a bit constraining. However, if you want to avoid pitfalls with session/state/cache management you really need to use the API and plug in your own providers as necessary.
With your database, if you need to link a user with any database element you'll be storing the user's login id (Context.User.Identity.Name).
You seem to mix the Profile/Membership/Role provider API. But to answer your question: why not use it? I would use it unless there is a real constraint that makes it unusable...
Hai,
i am trying to store the user permissions for my web site.But I am little bit confused with xml and Database. For each user in site have different permissions. Have u ever faced this issue? for Example , if my site is a shopping site , for a local user , the report menu need not to display. A sales man need not to display the purchase page. and so on ..
I think you understood my problem .I have done this user management using a xml file . For each user a new node will create according to the menu and keep in the xml file . Next time the user login ,checks the permissions and and show only the allowed menus.
My boss tell me to do the same thing using the Database. by using XmlDataSource it is quite simple to bind data to the treeview (for setting permission) and binding to the menustrip also.
He is pointing the security problem . i don't think like so.
Which is better ? DB or XML
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yh26yfzy.aspx
My advice would be to use asp.net membership and roles (written by Microsoft). It is a very good security solution - login security, roles (permissions) and is stored in a SQLServer database (not sure if it can be stored elsewhere).
I use it on my site and you can use membership controls straight out of the box (login forms, change password, etc.) or you can roll your own.
The only tricky bit I found was setting up the membership tables, views and stored procs in my dB (you download a dB script), but really it was fairly straightforward to implement.
Here's a link to asp.net membership and roles
ASP .NET Membership and Roles (part of the Provider Model introduced on ASP .NET 2) is (IMHO) nice only when you need some basic stuff. The issue is that you need to use the whole system using SQL Server, but if you are planning to move to a different DB provider (MySQL, SQLite, etc..) then you'd have to implement your own provider (which is at best painful), and learn how the whole pieces fit each other. Granted, finding a custom implementation it's quite easy, but is not a copy & paste thing.
Another bad thing of the default provider model is that you will get a ton of SQL stored procedures, also called maintainance nightmares. The issue is that if your site scales, then these SP's will make your life a living hell (been there) and if you even dare to change hostings then you're in for a treat, so my advice would be make your own permissions hierarchy and use it the way you wish. Also, look for advices and some pre-existing solutions to the permissions problem which is quite common.
Website security can be split up into to distinct parts.
Authentication: Logging in
Authroization: Roles/Permissions.
The ASP.NET Forms Authentication Provider is a great way to implement authentication. I recently created a custom provider that communicates with our companies X500 directory (LDAP). It was very straight forward.
For Authorization, we implemented the entlib security application block. It allows you to keep Roles/Permissions in a separate location that can be accessed by your UI as well as your service layers (assuming your developing a scale-able solution). You may also want to look at the Windows Itentity Foundation which is slated to supersede entlib security application block, however it is only available for .NET 4.0.
I am currently converting a very old, but working classic ASP site to ASP.Net.
It has a completely custom written user management system. Whilst it works fine, it really needs a refresh as I want it to be more flexible for some future projects in the works.
When I asked someone about this, they said "You need to use the Microsoft Provider" and gave a lecture on how Microsoft release all these things for free and how good they are and should be re used as much as possible.
I have done quite a bit of research on it (mainly looking at the videos on http://asp.net/learn ) and am very impressed by some of the features as there appears to be drag and drop components for items that would take me ages to write.
However, the current membership database is complicated to explain, it is a completely custom written database that has many internal relations... It is not really "compatible" with the default Microsoft Provider.
I have taken a look at How Do I: Create a Custom Membership Provider?, but I feel a little out of my comfort zone and worried it will either be slow, introduce a security hole or simply won't work.
At the end of the day, the Microsoft Membership Provider should work for me - the only customisations I really need is the login to use the username/password field in my database and the create user script which has a lot of custom code to several third party systems (needing to provision services etc.).
I was just wondering, what would you do if faced with a similar situation?
Use the Microsoft Membership Provider and somehow get it to work for you (although I would like suggestions)
Use the Microsoft Membership Provider but use custom provider that is customised around your code.
Use your own completely customised solution?
That video does complicate things :) If you're going to implement a custom provider then reflector over the existing one is a good place to start :)
As a quick and dirty option you could, of course, hack the stored procedures that the SQL Membership provider uses but the custom code to provision services is probably stretching that.
If you think about it the remote provisioning of services doesn't really belong in a membership provider, it's not really a membership function - all membership does is provide usernames and passwords and authentication around them. My own feeling is that you should move the provisioning of services out of there, and perform it on the ASP.NET site after a user has been created - even if that's just calling a stored procedure once the membership provider has done its thing. If you do this you may find that the SQL membership provider will do everything you need it to (probably with the Roles & profile providers too), and thus you have way less code to write!
I've been in similar situations in the past. In both cases we created custom implementations of the providers (MembershipProvider, RoleProvider, ProfileProvider) around the existing mechanism.
In both cases we only used the provider implementations for read-only access, e.g. to give us the easy validation gubbins in web.config and suchlike. The user administration code was left well alone as it worked just fine.
If the existing provider works (has the right fields for your data), use that to start. You can VERY easily replace that with a customer provider later (just a single config value change).
Beware there isn't an "out of the box" ASP.NET management interface for that, you'll need to roll your own or use a third party one.
Use my specialized MembershipProvider to work against my own database tables.
I am using asp.net 2.0. I have been using asp.net membership provider for user management. But I think this would be more efficient if I could do this without using role and membership provider provided in asp.net. In fact I see bulky markups generated when I add login control,
createuser control etc. in an asp.net web page.
By saying user management, I am referring to the overall login, user activity tracking, password reset/retrieval, role management in an asp.net web application. And I want to implement efficient way to accomplish this.
Any suggestion would be appreciated.
What exactly bothers you? Server-side code, or the HTML which gets served to the client?
If former, then you can implement your own providers or just reinvent the whole system from scratch (which I do not recommend, but it might be worth it in some scenarios).
If latter, just write your own set of controls that use Membership API.
As far as "efficiency" is concerned, you're not clear in what "efficient" means to you.
Most (all?) of the membership controls support templates, which means you can customize the markup they generate to the client.
See this tutorial to get you started: A Crash Course on ASP.NET Control Development: Template Properties
As for the database hits, I don't think it's a huge problem, but if you're concerned I'd suggest load testing it to make sure. Also, if you set CacheRolesInCookie to true, you can eliminate some of those database calls.