Build Your Own ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site Using C# & VB, Second Edition

Security and User Authentication

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The issue of security is important in many facets of information technology, but

it’s especially relevant in web development. While you’ll want to make sure that

your web site users are able to go where they need to go and see what they’re al-

lowed to see, you’ll also want to prevent unauthorized and malicious users from

getting into your system.

One common approach is to have visitors to your site log in before they can view

certain pages; another is to ensure that restricted pages cannot be accessed simply

by typing in the appropriate URLs, unless the user has been specifically allowed

to view those pages. Although different solutions exist for the various applications

you may create—for instance, IIS could provide certain pages to users who have

been authenticated by Windows within an intranet environment—this chapter

focuses on the more straightforward tasks of form- and script-based authentication.

In this chapter, we’ll learn some simple coding techniques and discover just how

easy it is to secure your web applications using ASP.NET. As with many other

chapters, this one contains many goodies that will be new to existing ASP.NET

1.0 and 1.1 programmers, because ASP.NET 2.0 delivers new techniques for

securing your web applications.

Security is a huge topic, and several books have been written on the subject. If

you’re serious about developing secure complex applications, we recommend that

you check out some additional resources, such as Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security,