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Is the Exception Handling Application Block a Security Risk?

Chris Kinsman made the following comment on my earlier post about the Exception Handling Application Block:

I also thought it was cool at first, however think about it. You are allowing external entities, i.e. end users, decide how errors should be handled in your code! Can you imagine the security holes this could open up? they can actually change the flow of execution, etc just by changing policies.

What do you think? Does the exception handling application block open security holes? What are the best practices for minimizing risk when using external policy files to define how we handle exceptions in our application?

Print | posted on Wednesday, February 02, 2005 3:09 PM

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# re: Is the Exception Handling Application Block a Security Risk?

left by Steve Maine at 2/2/2005 4:01 PM Gravatar
I don't think it's any less secure than COM+ applications that make use of the COM+ catalog. Both config files and COM+ catalog settings can change the behavior of an application, and you should take steps to secure your production environments against these changes. This is where "secure in deployment" comes in. End users shouldn't have the ability to make arbitrary changes to application configuration files deployed on a production machine. Those files should be ACL'ed and change controlled, just like other sensitive files on the box.

It's worth noting that you can encrypt your configuration files using the Enterprise Library configuration framework, which provides an additional layer of security against these types of attacks.

But you do raise a good point -- configuration changes are another potential attack vector that should *absolutely* be considered in any application's threat modeling process.

# re: Is the Exception Handling Application Block a Security Risk?

left by Chris Kinsman at 2/6/2005 2:40 AM Gravatar
This is a bit different than COM+ config. That is more analogous to changing AppSettings in the .config file of an application.

# re: Is the Exception Handling Application Block a Security Risk?

left by Hitesh at 8/10/2005 4:56 AM Gravatar
You can protect the config settings by encrypting them!
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