Enterprise Library 4.1 - October 2008
Design of the Security Application Block
The Security Application Block addresses the following areas:
- Authorization
- Security-related caching
Design Goals
The application block is designed to achieve the following goals:
- Provide a simple and intuitive interface to the commonly required authorization functionality.
- Encapsulate the logic used to perform authorization and security-related caching.
- Present a standard provider model for authorization and security-related caching.
- Ensure that the application block is extensible.
- Ensure that there is minimal or negligible performance impact compared to security code that access the .NET Framework classes directly to accomplish the same functionality.
- Incorporate best practices for application security, as described in Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures.
Design Highlights
The Security Application Block is designed to externalize the implementation of the authorization and caching provider from a running application. This design lets you change implementations without changing the code of the application. Figure 1 illustrates the interrelationship between the key classes in the Security Application Block.
.png)
Figure 1
Design of the Security Application Block