Hi,
We have a WinForm application running och Windows. This application offers extended logging on the client of Exceptions. Until now we have placed this XML file in the root off the application but Its not always that the correct permissions exists to write in this file.
Is there any best practice for this? Where should the ExceptionLog be placed and how do we handle the permissions?
Maby the log should be placed in a user folder (C:\Users\UserX)
BestRegards
I recommend you to use some library for exception logging. For exapmle log4net or nlog. They allow you to change the way logs are written. Log4net has big set of different appenders that can log to database, text or xml files, event log and even send email. Log4net could be configured without recompiling your application, according clients machine.
Related
I have a winforms application that connects to a database with a connection string and a generic user
"Database=DBADAS;Server=TMT123\\SQLEXPRESS;User ID=user; Password=*****;
After connecting into the database with a login dialog, we check if the user and password are existent in the user table from the database.
My question is now if this is a good practice? because basically in the connection string there is every information needed to crack the server.
There are a few ways to go about this safely. Since it's a Winforms app and not a web application, most of your security risks involve someone already in your network peeking at the connection string. This adds a layer of security in and of itself.
1. Hardcoded
You can hardcode the connection string that fetches the users into a DLL and make your application depend on that DLL. I only suggest this because it sounds like the "generic user" password is permanent; otherwise, you'd have to recompile code every time you changed the password, then deploy again. This is very secure, however, as the value isn't stored in plain text.
2. App.Config
You can stick it in a configuration file. Within a secured network, this is probably the most versatile option, as you can store multiple strings and easily update them without updating the full application. This goes well alongside settings like a "DebugMode" setting, etc. Using App.Config or another XML file is ideal, but you can roll a quick and dirty .txt file, too.
3. Database
Probably the most secure way of all, as you can encrypt your database and code your programs to fetch their connection strings and login information from that database by using an unrelated login. This allows greater control over what can be reached by the application when a user has not yet logged in. It also prevents the software from operating outside of the network, which may be desirable.
4. Internal API
Having a separate application serve this data divorces user capability from your concerns, as the API and your app can exchange verification keys to see if your app even has permission to try to connect. This is my personal favorite, but obviously the most work to set up.
5. Registry Entry
Depending on how you have this installed, it may work well to embed the tokens you need in the Registry. This guarantees the app requires admin permissions to install, and allows you to use Windows security to restrict access to the hive.
Again, since it's an internal non-web app, I wouldn't worry too much about the plain text of the connectionstring; if someone has gotten this far into your network, chances are you have much bigger problems already. I wouldn't leave it floating as a plain text file in a local directory, but any degree of security above that is probably acceptable for your purposes.
Encrypting Web.Config
Open Command Prompt with Administrator privileges
At the CommandPrompt, enter:
cd C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319
In case your web Config is located in "D:\Articles\EncryptWebConfig" directory path, then enter the following to encrypt the ConnectionString:
ASPNET_REGIIS -pef "connectionStrings" "D:\Articles\EncryptWebConfig"
Use Aspnet_regiis.exe tool with the –pef option and specify the application path as shown above.
Note: The parameter "connectionStrings" is case sensitive.
For Winforms: You need to rename your app.config to web.config encrypt it by using steps 1 to 3 and again rename it to app.config.
Reference: https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/795135/Encrypt-ConnectionString-in-Web-Config
I have a question regarding a WinForm application and ClickOnce Deployment.
Currently, I use the Visual Studio Installer for creating my installer. One of the things that I do is I have created a custom installer class that I use for entering in certain information (servername, database name, username, password, port number - which is needing for my connection string to the DB). This information gets written to my app config file. However, this makes updates a pain, so I am looking into ClickOnce Deployment instead.
For those of you that do something similar, what's the best way to go about handling this? Is it possible for me to include a config file with my ClickOnce Deployment project that will just copy the settings from that file during the installation? Or, what is the recommend best practice for handling this?
Thanks everyone.
My ClickOnce application also accesses a database. I created a separate program that asks for the database information and encrypts it into a .DAT file. The .DAT file is added to the main program. You must change a setting on the file to Content so that it is included in deployment. The main program opens the .DAT file and decrypts it for the information. This way no one that uses the program knows any of the database information.
I have a page on an intraweb (that I didn't create) which allows a user to specify a .txt file and then it writes the results of a SQL stored procedure to the file using StreamWriter.
It apparently stopped working for some of my workstations several months ago, so I can't trace it to any specific changes (However, I know the code itself didn't change).
If I access & use the page on the server (where the wwwroot and applicable database are located), it successfully writes the .txt, whether I specified a local file or on a workstation on the network. Users on some workstations,though, are no longer able to write to a file.
(It is also not just writing a blank file. The "Date Modified" remains unchanged.)
The problem seems to be machine-related rather than user-related, as I can login as the same user on different workstations with different results.
I still think it may have something to do with permissions, so I created a .txt on a problem workstation with every possible account having full permissions, but no luck. Permissions on the database, stored procedure, and folder destination seem correct.
Any suggestions welcome, Thanks.
You mean to tell us that the page completes with success, your calls to StreamWriter all succeed, and yet in the end there is no file? I find that really hard to digest. A much more likely hypothesis is that the page fails and exception is thrown. Such an exception would be logged normally in the system event log.
From the description of your symptoms the issue could be a constrained delegation scenario: the page is impersonating the IE user and it cannot flow the credentials to whe accessing the network resource.
It turned out to be the IE security setting "Include local directory when uploading files to a server". This setting is disabled by default.
The working PCs had the setting enabled for some reason. Adding the site as a "Trusted Site" also enables the setting, achieving the same result.
So I have a local WPF web browser application and I need it to write to a text file. However I always get the an exception of type System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException. I don't get any more information but I'm pretty sure it is because it is being run from a web browser (security etc.).
The code I am using works in a regular windows form application etc. it is the usual:
StreamWriter sw;
sw = File.CreateText("c:\\myTextFile.txt");
sw.WriteLine("First line");
sw.Close();
So, is there a workaround for this?
Many thanks,
Thomas
You could try running in Full Trust mode.
WPF in a browser is going to default to partial trust. You can change that in the Security tab in Project Properties (subject, of course, to it being installed by a trusted user).
The issue is not WPF security problems. The issue is an operating system security feature in play: you can't write to the root of the C: drive without admin privs. Not only would your app need to be in WPF Full Trust mode, but you'd need to grant your app administrative priveledges on Vista and Windows 7 and beyond.
All that said, you should be able to write to files in non-protected paths. For example, you could write to a temporary file as returned by Path.GetTempFilePath(). However, it's likely your WPF browser app will still have to be running in full trust to write to disk at all.
See this page, describing Partial Trust security considerations. If you need to store the file for your own application's use, consider using Isolated Storage. If you want to allow the user to save a file to disk, you can use SaveFileDialog.OpenFile to allow the user to choose a path and confirm saving the file.
I'm working on a website in JSP (in GWT really, but on the server side, it's really just JSP), and I need to configure my database.
I know HOW to code in the database connection etc, but i'm wondering how/where the database config should be saved.
To clarify my doubt, let me give an example; in PHP, a website usualy has a config.php, where the user configures the database, user, etc (or an install.php generates it).
However, since JSP is bytecode, I can't code this info into my site and have the user modify it, nor can I modify it analogously to an install.php.
How should I handle this? what's the best/most common practice ? I've found NO examples of this. Mainly, where should the config file be stored?
There are several possibilities to do this, what I've seen done include:
Having database credentials in a special file, usually db.properties or some simple XML file that contain the required information (driver, url, username, password, any ORM parameters if needed). The properties file would be placed under WEB-INF or WEB-INF/classes; the downside of this approach is that the user would have to modify the file inside the WAR before deploying it to the application server.
Acquire the database connection via JNDI and expect it to be provided by the application server. This seems to be the most common way of doing this; on the upside, your WAR doesn't have to be changed, however, the downside is that configuring a JNDI data source is different for every application server and may be confusing if your system administrators are not experienced with Java technology.