Securing web application on the data access level - asp.net-mvc

Please consider the following setup:
Multi-tenant webapp.
Tenants create company accounts and company accounts have user accounts under them.
Users have roles, there's a special role "Owner" (the user who created the company account).
I'd like to have users to edit other user accounts (some admin tasks), but two conditions must be met:
Noone may edit owner's data (except for owner, when he's editing his own profile, and own profile editing is the same user editing).
Users may access user data and edit users only within their company account.
The app uses MVC architecture. Currently I check for those two conditions in the web layer and it works for me, but I have some concerns. If I go with some sort of API or some other type of data consumer, I may "forget" to re-inforce these conditions. Also, there will be other objects in the app with similar functionality requirements and which will have similar restrictions on them, so it's better for me to come up with some sort of pattern which will enforce my restrictions on data access level.
Could anyone recommend some approach worth looking into?
Thanks!

I beleive aspects or interceptors should be able to help you. If you work with objects you should be able to intercept requests containing your business data and check wether your user is allowed to work on it. The interceptor could then stop or proceed the execution.

Related

How can we temporarily restrict the access of a disabled user in ASP.NET MVC?

I have a comprehensive web platform where I have roles such as applicant, member, administrator (financial, technical, etc.). A member is a role that a web site applicant purchases a login account. During the lifecycle of this platform, a member is can be disabled for various reasons.
If a member wants to become active, he or she must have certain access, depending on the reason for their inactivity, for example, to pay for their annual subscription money or complete their qualifications.
The question is how can I restrict a disabled member from accessing certain functions. As we know, one of the easiest and safest ways is to use role attributes on top of the action
 [Authorize (Roles = "member")]
Assuming we have two reasons for deactivation, is it right to temporarily change the role of the member to one of those two reasons and given that the user no longer has the role of member?
Solution Two: Is it the right thing to check in each of our important functions each time that the member is active?
Or another way ...
Thanks for guiding me.
Respectfully

Multiple user tiers Google+ API?

The question is fairly simple, but I've yet to find an answer to it. Is it possible to use Google+ API in an asp.net-mvc web app that requires multiple tiers of users?
For example, this app basically needs three sets of users and permissions associated with each: Admins, Members, Guests. Mind you, I've never handled user authentication of any type before, so I'm happy to hear suggestions for other frameworks if you think those would be better.
I think its going to be very hard for you to get three sets of user credentials in a single app.
For you to be able to authenticate as user one your going to need user one to authenticate your application then you will have access to that users data. If you need access to user twos data your going to have to have that user authenticate your application. If you need access to both users the same time its going to be very hard for you to get this access unless they are both using the same computer together.
While it is possible to get a refresh token for user one returned which you could store on your server some place and then use that to access user ones data when user two is on their machine. This becomes a gray area as you are responsible of holding user ones data private especially from user two.
as for your different leaves of users thats just part of your system it should just be a matter of strong the users ids associated with their role within the system.
None of this has anything to do with doing this in .net. You could probably work it all out using the .net client library. Web applications (ASP.NET MVC)

No result returned using Valence API desire2learn

I'm working on migrating from SOAP to valence API. I'm having some problems with a few calls like getting users (All users, based on role, by userID, etc) and grades (All variations).
I see an empty list returned with no items. There's no error of any kind. When I try to get the data using SOAP, I get the desired data.
I've checked the permissions for "Search for Students", so technically, I should be getting something when I try to get all users or by role id of students. What else am I missing here...
The D2LWS service's authentication mechanism puts the API caller in the position of being a privileged caller. The Valence Learning Framework APIs use a different auth model: the user ID/Key tokens that identify a user get employed by the back-end to restrict the functionality of calls. That is: the authenticated user should have access to the same functionality and data as the user would get through the web UI, and no more.
In this particular case, the calls succeed: they send back all the elements in the result set that your calling user has privileges to see -- none of them.
This is almost certainly an issue with the role privileges afforded to your calling user, and debugging the permissions around calls can be challenging. The Valence project's documentation provides a walkthrough topic on investigating role permissions that might shed let on a possible approach here, especially with respect to the calls to gain access to user records (or properties that appear in user records).
As the walkthrough discusses, there are various aspects to making the general call to /d2l/api/lp/{version}/users/ that bring permissions into play:
If you're trying to filter with a query parameter, does the calling user context have permissions to use the data on which you want to filter
Does the calling user context have permission to see properties affected by User Information Privacy settings
Does the calling user have permission to search for all the user roles they need to, in order find users in the result set
The users call operates on the root organization unit, so the permissions the calling user requires must be set on the organization org unit type.
By contrast, the Grades-related API calls operate not on the root organization unit, but typically on course offerings, sections, or groups. The permissions surrounding the calls there will get checked in the associated org unit types, so the calling user will need the right permissions against those types. Additionally, many of the calls related to course offerings (also sections and groups) require that the calling user be enrolled in the org unit in question (and in some cases, explicitly enrolled, not merely enrolled by cascading enrollment).
If you're sure that your calling user context does give you access to these things (and allows you access to this data through the web UI), and you still see a mismatch like this when you're calling through the API, then you may have uncovered a defect of some kind and you should please ask your organization's support contact, or your account manager, to open a support ticket to report that through Desire2Learn's support desk.

Group permissions for a website using spring security - design query

I am creating a Grails website where users will have access to the resources they create. Till here everything is clear to me. I define ROLE_USER and lock down my controllers and actions using the Config.groovy file.
The issue I am facing is that I have requirement to support group of users such that some resources created by a user can be edited/updated/deleted by other users of the same group. How do I associate a user with a "group" in spring security, what is the design/library I should use here?
What you will need to do is to have your users' roles (the authorizations) come from the database. Once that is the case, you can then easily adjust the roles a user (or set of users) has and create/remove them on the fly. The docs have some pretty good info on how to get the roles to come from the database, so I won't go any more into that here.
Once the dynamic roles are in place, however, you still need to be able to connect roles to the objects that are created. There are essentially two ways you can go about doing this:
Access Control Lists
Custom logic
Depending on the granularity you need and the flexibility you want, one option may be more appealing than another.
Access Control Lists essentially allow you to have a permission mapping between each user and each entity instance. As you can imagine, it's a fair bit of overhead and can perform poorly if you have a large number of entities and users.
Putting together your own logic, on the other hand, is much more flexible because you can set up your own scheme to connect entity instances or entity classes to users and their roles.
I dont think that spring-security provides such functionality out of the box so you will have to do that manually.
For each domain class that you this kind of functionality, store the user name of current logged in user
def authenticateService
def user = authenticateService.principal()
entity.setUser(user?.getUsername())
Then in the update/delete method of the contoller you should check if the role of the current logged in user matches
the role of the user that created the entity. If you have a match you should proceed with the update/delete otherwise throw an exception
/redirect the user to an error page
As role you can use the spring security roles or you can create a property on the user object you have created

Best approach to a customer portal in ASP.NET MVC

The problem: client needs a website to serve 10+ customers, each customer has 5-10 people they wish to grant access using login & user name, once "logged in" the user can download files specific to their company.
The files will be uploaded to a directory under the customer name, and displayed as a list. Currently using membership for all of the users, it's just the "by customer" segmentation I'm wondering about. the question being under ASP.NET MVC what is the cleanest or simplest approach to solving the customer segmentation, trying to avoid customer membership provider so was going to use the roles to assign customer group.
Thoughts appreciated.
In the past I tried to avoid the membership and role providers as well since I don't like the way they are implemented. So just use the old school way. Create two tables on your db, one stores the customers the other the users.
Just build a simple relationship like: User n ----- 1 Customer
Now if a user logs in first authenticate him/her against the User table, then authorize on the Customer table.
The provide the right downloads, just create an additional table File, which has a n:1 relationship to the Customer table (like the User table).

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