Building Secure ASP.NET Applications: Authentication, Authorization, and Secure Communication

By J.D. Meier, Alex Mackman, Michael Dunner, and Srinath Vasireddy

This guide presents a practical, scenario driven approach to designing and building secure ASP.NET applications for Windows 2000 and version 1.0 of the .NET Framework. It focuses on the key elements of authentication, authorization, and secure communication within and across the tiers of distributed .NET Web applications. (This roadmap: 6 printed pages; the entire guide: 608 printed pages)

This guide focuses on:

• Authentication (to identify the clients of your application)
• Authorization (to provide access controls for those clients)
• Secure communication (to ensure that messages remain private and are not altered by unauthorized parties)

Why authentication, authorization, and secure communication?
Security is a broad topic. Research has shown that early design of authentication and authorization eliminates a high percentage of application vulnerabilities. Secure communication is an integral part of securing your distributed application to protect sensitive data, including credentials, passed to and from your application, and between application tiers.

There are many technologies used to build .NET Web applications. To build effective application-level authentication and authorization strategies, you need to understand how to fine-tune the various security features within each product and technology area, and how to make them work together to provide an effective, defense-in-depth security strategy. This guide will help you do just that.

Click to Download