Our current Intranet environment is a little outdated. The current stack has ASP.NET 1.1/2.0 applications that are querying against a SQL 2000 database.
For role security, there are user groups on the servers that users are added into (so you need to be added into the group on the test and production machine). These user groups are synchronized into user roles on SQL 2000 itself. Roles are granted execute permissions to stored procedures as needed to prevent any access violations.
At the web application level, we use basic authentication (which authenticates against our Active Directory) and have identity impersonation turned on. The connection string to the database uses Integrated Security. This creates an environment where the web application connects to the database as the user logged in, which will enforce database security on stored procedures being called. It also allows us to use the typical User.IsInRole() method to perform authorization within the application itself.
There are several problems with this. The first is that only our server administrators have access to the user groups on the machine, so updating role security, or adding additional users is out of the hands of the application administrators. In addition, the only way to get the role was to call a SQL procedure called ‘xp_logininfo’ which is locked down in SQL 2005. While I don’t know the full details, our DBA tells us that this general model doesn’t play nice with SQL 2005 given the nature of schemas in the newer version.
We’re at the point now that we’re ready to update our environment. We’re writing .NET 3.5 apps to leverage more AJAX and SQL Server 2005 is the primary environment for our database. We’re looking to update the security model as well to be a bit more flexible for the application administrators, and potentially leverage Active Directory more.
One concern we have as well is that a given user will most likely have access to multiple applications, so having some kind of centralized solution is optimal so we can easily remove users when needed.
What is considered the best practice for maintaining role security in this kind of environment?
ASP.NET 2.0’s Membership, Roles, and Profile