.NET Framework Security Tools

This article has been excerpted from book "The Complete Visual C# Programmer's Guide" from the Authors of C# Corner.

The .NET Framework takes advantage of a host of security tools, enabling you to approach security in a number of ways. Table 22.3 lists many of the security tools available in the framework.

Table 22.3: .NET Framework Security Tools Security in 

Let's take a closer look at the three tools that are most often used in managing security within the .NET environment: .NET Framework Configuration tool, CASPOL (Code Access Security Policy Tool ), and SN(Strong Name Tool). 

.NET Framework Configuration Tool 

Microsoft recommends that you configure security policy using the .NET Framework Configuration tool (Mscorcfg.msc). You can launch Mscorcfg.msc by executing the following instruction: 

mmc <drive>:\\Winnt\Microsoft.NET\Framework\<version number>\mscorcfg.msc 

This tool provides various wizards to help you safely set and adjust enterprise-, machine-, and userlevel security policies. Therefore, you should start to spend time with this configuration tool as soon as you learn the basic concepts of .NET security. 

Some of the most useful wizards allow you to

• trust an application (i.e., identify an application by publisher or strong name information and increase the application's level of trust);
• adjust security settings (i.e., increase or decrease permissions to assemblies originating from one of the following zones: My Computer, Local Intranet, Internet, Trusted Sites, and Untrusted Sites);
• reset security policy level to the default settings;
• evaluate an assembly (i.e., determine the permissions that will be granted to an assembly or the code groups that give permissions to an assembly);
• create and modify existing policies at the enterprise, machine, and user levels; and
• create a deployment package (i.e., create a Windows Installer package to deploy security policy across an enterprise).

For more information on using the wizards, see the .NET Framework Configuration tool. 

If the wizards do not provide the functionality you require to administer security policy, you can edit the permission sets and code groups directly by using either the .NET Framework Configuration tool or CASPOL. For information on performing specific tasks using these tools, see Security Policy Configuration in the SDK documentation.

Conclusion

Hope this article would have helped you in understanding .NET Framework Security Tools. See other articles on the website on .NET and C#.

The Complete Visual C# Programmer's Guide covers most of the major components that make up C# and the .net environment. The book is geared toward the intermediate programmer, but contains enough material to satisfy the advanced developer.