Christoph Schittko is posting lots of great info on ASP.NET Security from DevDays

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Here’s the home page for Christoph who did the OpenHack demo at DevDays in Houston.

Here are some recent entries – he is following up from his talk (and questions he was asked) at DevDays and with more info and how-to’s

Vermont.NET Meeting March 8th: Jason Beres and Beer, too

Vermont

Infragistics recently scooped up Jason Beres (lucky them) and he moved from Florida to New Jersey. Tomorrow they are sending Jason, who is also an INETA speaker, to speak at Vermont.NET. Jason will fly in in the early afternoon, get a quick tour of Burlington, do the meeting then we’ll head back downtown to check out some of our famous college bars. Of course, it’s monday night – things are a little quiet. But all are free to join us. I know – there are *SO* many bloggers in Burlington. Actually there is Dave Burke and Roman Rehak. We used to have Joy (sniff sniff I miss her) “Cleverhack” Larkin who moved to PA to go to law school.

My user group is VERY spoiled. Read this prior post to see our list of hot .NET speakers who have come and are planning to come to Vermont.

Here’s the scoop on tomorrow’s meeting:

Who: Jason Beres
When: Monday March 8th 6pm-8 or 9pm
Where: KnowledgeWave, 300 Community Drive, So. Burlington, VT
Topic: Writing an N-Tier Windows Form Application
This presentation will look at the Tracker reference application and eBook as a real world example using key Microsoft technologies: Web Services Enhancements WS-Security, allowing secure authentication from the Windows Forms application to a web service for data access Microsoft Data Access Application block Microsoft Exception Management application block Microsoft Application Updater application block Multithreaded Windows Forms application for data access Structure for implementing online and offline data access without using Datasets XML Web Service data access or data access directly to SQL Server
Why: Well d’uh – to learn a lot, to eat free pizza to get great swag (courtesy of Infragistics)

Jason will be the next victim to stay at our house on the mountain and will then head up to Montreal on Tuesday to speak at GUVSM.

User Group Booths at DevDays

Ineta

MSDN was very generous in purchasing a booth at each DevDays event for local user groups to share in order to let attendees know about the user groups.

If you are a user group leader and are NOT set up to do this and want to be for an upcoming DevDays event, contact ugrelations@ineta.org asap.

If your user group is about to do a booth and has any questions, needs to talke with other local u.g. leaders or whatever, let us know and we will help you.

Lastly, if you already have done this at a now past DevDays event, again, let us know how it went!

Rich Turner: “Is .NET Remoting dead? No! Nope! Niet! Non! Negative! Nuh-huh! [shake head vigorously]!!!”

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Well that quote comes from this post (On the Road to Indigo – is .NET REmoting Dead?) by Microsoft’s Rich Turner and it caught my eye. In it, Rich explains the future of .NET Remoting.

I personally don’t have a lot of (well…any) experience with .NET Remoting. Once I got through the learning curve of web services (since that was what MS was pushing at the beginning of .NET) I got lazy and used web services even in situations where I knew that .NET remoting would have been more efficient.

So when I was at PDC listening to Don Box talking about Indigo and saying that if you want to use indigo, just keep using web services and and forget about remoting. I felt so justified. But according to Rich, I (like many, I am sure) missed the point.

So if you are using .net remoting and concerned about it’s future, go checkout Rich’s post because I am NOT the person to be explaining this to you.

more on XP Service Pack 2 and breaking developer apps

Just Rambling

Now that my awareness is up about the issues with XP SP2 from this Infoworld article, I caught this article from Microsoft Watch that has some more information. (I really have not had time to look into this so I am grateful for Joris Evers and Mary Jo Foley’s articles on this topic). Mary Jo notes that there will be some service packs for VS.NET 2002 and 2003 in the wings to help with some of the breaking changes. However, everything else seems to be up to us – oh all of those VB6 apps I have out there…sniff sniff. I wonder about my older FrontPage and ASP sites and my friends who run their businesses with Access database.

WinXP SP2 – attention – breaking changes, just prepare and you should be okay

Just Rambling

A new article in InfoWorld highlights the issue of breaking changes FOR DEVELOPERS in the SP2 release of WinXP. According to Pat Hynds (New England RD and CTO at Critical Sites) if we a) are paying attention to the security messages for developers such as at DevDays and b) take note of the information that is on this MSDN page that is for developers to prepare, things shouldn’t be so terrible.

Apparently Microsoft has been getting the word out to developers. I actually hadn’t noticed that yet. I know we are getting lots of info on how to write secure apps (and I am sharing that as well). I just hadn’t heard yet that this is a breaking change.

I think what it means for me is 2 3 things:

1) I have to test ALL of the apps I have in production against SP2 before any of my clients start upgrading (ugggh…)

and

2) I need to be aware of what I will need to do differently in my development environment. Hopefully, this is akin to dealing with the change from IIS5 – ASPNET account to IIS6 – Network Service account. That wasn’t so horrible.

3) (added) Oh yeah, and I don’t have a spare computer that I dare install the SP2 on to do all of this testing. This is a big problem. I have whidbey on my laptop and need it to work for learning and for upcoming presentations. I already have the Lonestar beta on my tablet and have to assure that I can use that to do my DevDays demos at Boston, plus I don’t feel like installing all of my apps and dev tools on there anyway. My husband uses his computer for doing paperwork for his business. So I’m kind of up a creek right now anyway.

From that page (link is above):

To developers these technologies will have impacts on the applications that they create and the tools they use. This page contains resources to assist developers in dealing with these impacts.  

From the article (quoting someone from MS)

Large vendors of software are getting help from Microsoft to make sure their applications are compatible with SP2, Goodhew said. Smaller vendors and others, such as enterprise software developers, need to do their own testing. “It is really up to developers to do the due diligence,” he said.

If developers do find that SP2 breaks their applications, it most likely means that they were not following best practices in terms of security when writing their applications, according to Goodhew.

Definitely pay attention to this!!!

In the long run it is a good thing of course. I just wish someone from Microsoft would come to *my* home office and make sure everything is still working! Pancakes and maple syrup anyone?? 🙂

ASP.NET Security in Tiers

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My jam-packed session at DevDays – Defenses and Countermeasures – shows a huge amount of solutions of things you can do to try to keep the hackers out. It was frustrating not to be able to get into the details of all of the great information that was in there due to the time limitation.

I think it would be interesting to look at all of those lessons in tiers.

The first tier would be basic, easy to remember, somewhat easy to implement solutions like:

  • never use sa as the account to access your database
  • use integrated security to access your database when you can, however if you *must* use uid & pwd your db access strings, hide them. THere are a number of ways including: use the configuration applicaton block which has this ability built via a wrapper to DPAPI OR encrypt the string yourself before putting it in your web.config file (in .net 1.x you will need to build your own little dpapi library to help you do this as well as to decrypt) OR encrypt to string and stuff it into the registry
  • check query strings in URLs to make sure they don’t include possible sql injection strings – this is pretty easy to just do in the page load
  • use stored procedures FIRST, paramaterized queries as a 2nd option and concantenated queries never
  • validate data entry to limit possiblity of characters that are used for sql injection or cross-site scripting attacks
  • never use the system account for your web application
  • htmlencode all output back to the browser

Even with this top tier list, there are two audiences. The first audience only needs the list and either know how to accomplish these things or knows how to find them. That audience just wants a check list, then you can also talk about a LOT more things. THe other audience would need this list to be the entire one hour presentation so you can really dig into each thing – how to do the encryption, looking at the difference between the effect of a query string with a sql injection attack and a stored procedure with the same attempted sql injection attack, experiment with the variety of other ways to prevent nasty input.

I will be thinkig about all of this a lot until the next DevDays  (in Boston) where I will presenting this session again.