Convention based security: A MonoRail Sample
time to read 4 min | 665 words

I was asked how I would got about building a real world security with the concept of securing operations instead of data.

This is a quick & dirty implementation of the concept by marrying Rhino Security to MonoRail. This is so quick and dirty that I haven't even run it, so take this as a concept, not the real implementation, please.

The idea is that we can map each request to an operation, and use the convention of "id" as a special meaning to perform operation security that pertain to specific data.

Here is the code:

public class RhinoSecurityFilter : IFilter
{
    private readonly IAuthorizationService authorizationService;

    public RhinoSecurityFilter(IAuthorizationService authorizationService)
    {
        this.authorizationService = authorizationService;
    }

    public bool Perform(ExecuteWhen exec, IEngineContext context, IController controller,
                        IControllerContext controllerContext)
    {
        string operation = "/" + controllerContext.Name + "/" + controllerContext.Action;
        string id = context.Request["id"];
        object entity = null;
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(id) == false)
        {
            Type entityType = GetEntityType(controller);
            entity = TryGetEntity(entityType, id);
        }

        if(entity==null)
        {
            if (authorizationService.IsAllowed(context.CurrentUser, operation) == false)
            {
                DenyAccessToAction();
            }
        }
        else
        {
            if (authorizationService.IsAllowed(context.CurrentUser, entity, operation) == false)
            {
                DenyAccessToAction();
            }
        }
        return true;
    }
}

It just perform a security check using the /Controller/Action names, and it tries to get the entity from the "id" parameter if it can.

Then, we can write our base controller:

[Filter(ExecuteWhen.BeforeAction,typeof(RhinoSecurityFilter))]
public class AbstractController : SmartDispatcherController
{

}

Now you are left with configuring the security, but you already have a cross cutting security implementation.

As an example, hitting this url: /orders/list.castle?id=15

Will perform a security check that you have permission to list customer's 15 orders.

This is pretty extensive, probably overly so, however. A better alternative would be to define an attribute with the ability to override the default operation name, so you can group several action into the same operation.

You would still need a way to bypass that, however, since there are some thing where you would have to allow access and perform custom permissions, no matter how flexible Rhino Security is, or you may be required to do multiply checks to verify that, and this system doesn't allow for it.

Anyway, this is the overall idea, thoughts?

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