System Access Guidelines

[Brett]

Looking for documented guides for developing certain system access features
in ASP/VB .Net and even Classic ASP. With the newer technologies, I suspect
there's an easy way and a difficult way. For example, using the TIMEOUT
atrribute of Forms Authentication. You could certainly code that
functionality as well, but...

Some specific fetaures I'm looking into include:
- Auto-generate a first time password that must be changed on first login
- Change password every xx days
- Requiring strong passwords
- Disable password reuse
- Limit the number of login attempts,m then lock user out
- Auto-logout after xx minutes of inactivity

I'm guessing there's a book or on-line resource or something else that
covers these.

Thanks

Brett Ossman

 

[Brett]

Just let me add that a book, etc. on key productivity features of VS 2008
and framework 3.5 would be good to. Again, just key or especially noteworthy
features for starters.

Thanks again

 

[Brett]

Looking for documented guides for developing certain system access features
in ASP/VB .Net and even Classic ASP. With the newer technologies, I suspect
there's an easy way and a difficult way. For example, using the TIMEOUT
atrribute of Forms Authentication. You could certainly code that
functionality as well, but...

Some specific fetaures I'm looking into include:
- Auto-generate a first time password that must be changed on first login
- Change password every xx days
- Requiring strong passwords
- Disable password reuse
- Limit the number of login attempts,m then lock user out
- Auto-logout after xx minutes of inactivity

I'm guessing there's a book or on-line resource or something else that
covers these.

Thanks

Brett Ossman

 

[Joe Kaplan]

To a great extent, much of this depends on what you use for the backing
store for your identities.

For example, if you were to use AD or AD/LDS as the backing store with the
AD membership provider, then all these ID management features (lockout,
strong passwords, expiration, etc.) are handled by the underlying directory
store. However, if you use SQL, then you must come up with a way to build a
lot of them yourself. The providers can help with this, but there is likely
additional work to do.

Also note that it can be quite difficult to handle things like password
expiration for systems where the user is not logging in frequently as you
generally need some sort of external notification mechanism (email message
or something) to let them know their password is expiring.

The actual timeout of the cookie for forms auth is just a configuration
setting in web.config and is independent of the underlying store.

 

[Brett]

Thanks for the reply.

It will definitely be a SQL backend. I figured I would have to develop
these features, and could certainly figure out a way to do so. I was just
wondering if there were book(s), article(s), etc. that cover these topics to
save some time. I want to make sure I take full advantage of the VS 2008 and
..Net 3.5 tools available.

Thanks again

Brett Ossman

 

[Joe Kaplan]

I know there is a book out there about the membership system specifically
that might be interesting to you. Unfortunately, I haven't read it myself
so I don't know whether it addresses any of your specific concerns or not.
I don't know how people tend to add this to SQL normally as I don't actually
work with SQL-based identity stores.

I hope you get some good answers.