Improving ASP.NET Security with Visual Studio 2010 Code Analysis

Anyone doing ASP.NET development probably admits, openly or not, to introducing or stumbling upon a security issue at some point during their career. Developers are often pressured to deliver code as quickly as possible, and the complexity of the platform and vast number of configuration options often leaves the application in a less than desirable security state. In addition, the configuration requirements for debugging and production are different, which can often introduce debugging settings in production, causing a variety of issues.

Over the years, the ASP.NET platform has matured and better documentation has been made available through MSDN and community blogs, but knowing which feature or configuration setting to use is often troublesome. Even with good knowledge of the security functionality, mistakes can happen that could result in security vulnerabilities in your application.

Peer code review is a useful process and a good way to catch issues early. Still, not everyone has the time or budget—or knowledgeable peers at hand—for such review.

Since the introduction of code analysis in Visual Studio 2005, developers have been able to automatically analyze their code to see if it complies with a series of best practices ranging from design, maintainability, performance and security. So far, code analysis has been a great tool, but it hasn’t focused on providing best security practice guidance for ASP.NET—until now.

In this article I’ll introduce you to the new ASP.NET code analysis rules that can be used with Visual Studio code analysis as well as with the standalone FxCop application to improve the security of your ASP.NET applications.

Overview
You can download the ASP.NET security code analysis rules package for Visual Studio 2010 and FxCop version 10.0 from go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9750555. The installation contains three new rules packages:

ASP.NET.Security: This category focuses on security best practices related to how System.Web.Ui.Page properties are initialized.
ASP.NET.MVC.Security: This category focuses on security best practices related to how ASP.NET MVC is used.
ASP.NET.Security.Configuration: This category focuses on security best practices related to configuration elements under the web.config files.
Once the rules package is installed, you can start reviewing the security of your Web application automatically by clicking on the Run Code Analysis on Web Site button under the Build menu (see Figure 1). The analysis will review each Page class and web.config file of your application against a series of security best practices for ASP.NET.

Read more: MSDN Magazine

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