OWASP ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate Project

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ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate Project

The default ASP.NET MVC project template uses insecure defaults and omits many security features altogether. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate is a Visual Studio project template that enables security features by default and adds liberal comments and links to further resources to help developers (Who often do not have a lot of knowledge on the subject) get started.

Description

A professional ASP.NET MVC template for building secure, fast, robust and adaptable web applications or sites. It provides the minimum amount of code required on top of the default MVC template provided by Microsoft to provide security by default.

Better Defaults

The default MVC template provided by Microsoft is not as secure as it could be. There are various settings (Mostly in the web.config file) which are insecure by default. For example, it leaks information about which version of IIS you are using and allows external scripts to access cookies by default! ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate makes everything secure by default.

TLS and HTTPS

Setting up TLS, so that your site runs over HTTPS is very difficult in ASP.NET MVC as it requires several steps to do it correctly. ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate makes this easy with step by step instructions and links.

HTTP Headers

Several HTTP headers are also used to provide better security using the NWebSec NuGet packages:

1. Content Security Policy (CSP).
2. Strict-Transport-Security
3. Public-Key-Pins
4. X-Content-Type-Options
5. X-Download-Options
6. X-Frame-Options

Detailed Comments

ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate provides detailed comments and links to official documentation explaining all of the security features.

Fingerprint Resistant

ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate attempts to thwart fingerprinting tools by removing the IIS and .NET version HTTP headers and also changing several defaults including session and anti-forgery cookie names.

Dynamic IP Security

ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate enables IIS Dynamic IP Security to limit the maximum number of concurrent requests to thwart DDOS attacks.

Licensing

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License 2.0 as published by the Free Software Foundation 2015.

Project Resources

• GitHub Project Home Page where you can view source code, log issues and view the change log.
• Visual Studio Gallery where you can install the project template, rate/review it.
• My RehanSaeed.com blog where I post articles detailing features of the project. The project template itself links to many of the articles so that developers can get detailed information if they need it.

Project Leader

Muhammad Rehan Saeed

Classifications

News and Events

Read all of the blog articles about this project here.

Roadmap

As ASP.NET MVC evolves and many of the JavaScript libraries release new updates, this project template needs constant updates. It is intended that this project template remain as current as possible. I would like to add more security features to the site template and add more documentation and helper comments.

Getting Involved

All are welcome to get involved. Simply visit the GitHub site and raise a pull request for your code.

A Visual Studio Project Template which you can download here