Revision as of 10:26, 23 July 2013

.NET Authentication Controls

In the .NET, there are Authentication tags in the configuration file. The <authentication> element configures the authentication mode that your applications use.

<authentication>

The appropriate authentication mode depends on how your application or Web service has been designed. The default Machine.config setting applies a secure Windows authentication default as shown below.

authentication Attributes:mode="[Windows|Forms|Passport|None]"

<authentication mode="Windows" />

==Forms Authentication Guidelines==. To use Forms authentication, set mode=“Forms” on the <authentication> element. Next, configure Forms authentication using the child <forms> element. The following fragment shows a secure <forms> authentication element configuration:

<authentication mode="Forms">
 <forms loginUrl="Restricted\login.aspx" Login page in an SSL protected folder
  protection="All" Privacy and integrity
  requireSSL="true" Prevents cookie being sent over http
  timeout="10" Limited session lifetime
  name="AppNameCookie" Unique per-application name
  path="/FormsAuth" and path
  slidingExpiration="true" > Sliding session lifetime
 </forms>
</authentication>

Use the following recommendations to improve Forms authentication security:

• Partition your Web site.
• Set protection=“All”.
• Use small cookie time-out values.
• Consider using a fixed expiration period.
• Use SSL with Forms authentication.
• If you do not use SSL, set slidingExpiration = “false”.
• Do not use the <credentials> element on production servers.
• Configure the <machineKey> element.
• Use unique cookie names and paths.

classic ASP

For classic ASP pages, authentication is usually performed manually by including the user information in session variables after validation against a DB, so you can look for something like:

Session ("UserId") = UserName
Session ("Roles") = UserRoles