C#6 brought some nice short-hand ways of handling properties. I really like them, because they take away much boilerplate code. But as with all new tools, it’s easy to use them wrongly until they are familiar.
These are two attempts to declare a readonly property that preserves the time stamp of when the object was created. They look similar, but only one of them is right.
class SomeClass
{
public DateTime CreationTimeA => DateTime.UtcNow;
public DateTime CreationTimeB { get; } = DateTime.UtcNow;
} |
class SomeClass
{
public DateTime CreationTimeA => DateTime.UtcNow;
public DateTime CreationTimeB { get; } = DateTime.UtcNow;
}
After more than 8 years at Kentor the time as come to move on. I’m leaving Kentor and starting my own business. I will continue to work with identity and access management, especially SAML2 on .NET. I will do consulting, open source development and training, both on site and remotely. The Kentor.AuthServices project will be transferred to my new company, Sustainsys
Kentor.AuthServices 0.21.2 has just been released to NuGet. It is a security release fixing three issues.
- XML External Entity Injection (affecting .NET 4.5 only)
- Malicious IdP can cause write to arbitrary file
- Flawed ReturnUrl validation leads to Open Redirect
The first two issues were reported by John Heasman, Morgan Roman and Joshua Estalilla from DocuSign. While I have dreaded the day when I would get a security issue I am extremely happy with the professionalism of the disclosure. I got the report privately, including detailed descriptions, reproduction steps and solid recommendations on how to fix it. I am very grateful you took the time to review AuthServices and find the issues and for the detailed reports.
More details on the vulernabilities will be published later.
I’m a fan of code coverage as a way to ensure that there are covering tests. One area that I tend to rely heavily on Code Coverage for is to catch any tests that are no longer working correctly due to changes in the production code. That often works out well, but today I got betrayed by the code coverage engine.
The code that I worked on contained an if statement with a multi-step && expression.
bool IsAllWrong(int importantValue, bool b)
{
bool a = importantValue == GetAnswer();
bool c = false;
bool d = false;
if (!a && !b && !c && !d)
{
return true;
}
return false;
} |
bool IsAllWrong(int importantValue, bool b)
{
bool a = importantValue == GetAnswer();
bool c = false;
bool d = false;
if (!a && !b && !c && !d)
{
return true;
}
return false;
}
Of course I had tests that made the evaluation fail both because of importantValue and b. So what happend later was that GetAnswer() was updated, without the test for when importantValue being updated. Of course (my bad) that test had set b to true, causing the evaluation to fail on b, causing true to be returned. So the test passed, but not due to the thing I wanted to test. In a complex application, this is bound to happen every now and then. But usually, the code coverage scores will reveal that there is an execution path not covered. But not this time! The trustworthy code coverage analysis betrayed me!
Half a years worth of pull requests with great features have finally been baked into an official release of Kentor.AuthServices which is now available on Nuget. The most important fixes are improved active/passive handling for the Owin middleware and full support for SHA256/384/512 as it is time to leave SHA1.
First of all I would like thank all contributors and users that have had to wait for this while I’ve been on parental leave. A special thanks to Explunit who has made a lot of valuable contributions as well as reviewing pull requests and taken part in design discussions.
Breaking Changes
The public API of AuthServices is getting more and more stable, but nevertheless there are some breaking changes.
- The Owin Middleware is now once again Passive by default
- The Owin Middleware will act as Active during Logout, even if it is configured as passive. This can be disabled with the
StrictOwinAuthenticationMode compatibility setting.
- On .NET 4.6.2 and later AuthServices now by default generates SHA256-based signatures and only accepts SHA256 or stronger signatures.
- The “clever” ReturnUrl expansion has been removed as it proved to create more problems than it solved.
- ReturnUrl open redirect issue fixed.
