Implementation review for a MVC.NET app with custom membership
- by mrjoltcola
I'd like to hear if anyone sees any problems with how I implemented the security in this Oracle based MVC.NET app, either security issues, concurrency issues or scalability issues.
First, I implemented a CustomOracleMembershipProvider to handle the database interface to the membership store.
I implemented a custom Principal named User which implements IPrincipal, and it has a hashtable of Roles.
I also created a separate class named AuthCache which has a simple cache for User objects. Its purpose is simple to avoid return trips to the database, while decoupling the caching from either the web layer or the data layer. (So I can share the cache between MVC.NET, WCF, etc.)
The MVC.NET stock MembershipService uses the CustomOracleMembershipProvider (configured in web.config), and both MembershipService and FormsService share access to the singleton AuthCache.
My AccountController.LogOn() method:
1) Validates the user via the MembershipService.Validate() method, also loads the roles into the User.Roles container and then caches the User in AuthCache.
2) Signs the user into the Web context via FormsService.SignIn() which accesses the AuthCache (not the database) to get the User, sets HttpContext.Current.User to the cached User Principal.
In global.asax.cs, Application_AuthenticateRequest() is implemented. It decrypts the FormsAuthenticationTicket, accesses the AuthCache by the ticket.Name (Username) and sets the Principal by setting Context.User = user from the AuthCache.
So in short, all these classes share the AuthCache, and I have, for thread synchronization, a lock() in the cache store method. No lock in the read method.
The custom membership provider doesn't know about the cache, the MembershipService doesn't know about any HttpContext (so could be used outside of a web app), and the FormsService doesn't use any custom methods besides accessing the AuthCache to set the Context.User for the initial login, so it isn't dependent on a specific membership provider.
The main thing I see now is that the AuthCache will be sharing a User object if a user logs in from multiple sessions. So I may have to change the key from just UserId to something else (maybe using something in the FormsAuthenticationTicket for the key?).
