.NET Framework Security

The Security Stack Walk

The type of stack walk that concerns us here is, of course, the security stack walk. Why would the security system need to walk the stack at all?

Let's take a simple example. Given the following code snippet from assembly MyDatabase,

public class MyDatabase
{
    public void BackupDatabase(String filename)
    {
        FileStream stream = new FileStream(filename, FileMode.Create);
        // Code to save database to newly created file...
    }
}

when the BackupDatabase method calls the constructor for FileStream, a security demand will be initiated to ensure that the caller has sufficient privilege to create the named file. Recall that the .NET Framework security system is primarily based on code access security. In other words, the security demand ...