Contents tagged with ASP.NET

  • ASP.NET 2.0 x64 – You may get HTTP 400 Bad Request or Error as mentioned in KB 932552 or 826437

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    I’m sure you already know about this fix for ASP.NET which fixes an issue of “not a valid path” exception, and this fix for ASP.NET 1.1 for the same reason. If you receive this error now on your application, you might not need to apply the hotfix because your ASP.NET version might be higher than the one available with this hotfix, so verify the DLL versions before even requesting the hotfix from Microsoft.

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  • ASP.NET - Using the same encryption method used by ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider to encrypt secret password answer and store it in AD

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    Okay, this is an interesting stuff. MembershipProvider automatically encrypts most of the sensitive information such as password, secret-question-password. What if you want to use the same encryption method yourself to encrypt data?

    Before continuing reading, You need to understand and keep in mind that your <machinekey> section is the one which would be used for the encryption / decryption by the MembershipProvider. If you change it after encryption, your decryption may fail. So, please be careful while modifying anything on <machinekey> section in your web.config.

    I've just created a class inheriting from MembershipProvider. I've implemented all the methods of it (just a dummy implementation - VS would be more than happy to do that for you - if you find difficulty in this, write to me; I'll help you). I've also created another new method called EncryptMe which takes a string and returns me a string which is in fact the encrypted string. This method just gets the string in bytes with RNGCryptoServiceProvider and just call the function EncryptPassword of the MembershipProvider class to do the encryption.

    In fact, the EncryptPassword method is a protected method of the MembershipProvider class, and by using it, we have just achieved the same encryption which is used by the MembershipProvider class (which our ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider also uses to encrypt your secret-password-answer). Since it is protected, you can't access it anywhere outside, but inside a derived class.

    Source of my EncryptMe Function
        public string EncryptMe(string s)
    {
        byte[] bytes = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(s);
        byte[] data = new byte[0x10];
        new System.Security.Cryptography.RNGCryptoServiceProvider().GetBytes(data);
        byte[] dst = new byte[data.Length + bytes.Length];
        Buffer.BlockCopy(data, 0, dst, 0, data.Length);
        Buffer.BlockCopy(bytes, 0, dst, data.Length, bytes.Length);
        byte[] b = EncryptPassword(dst);
        return Convert.ToBase64String(b);
    }

    Now, you can just store the encrypted string to the active directory property which you've mapped to the Secret-question-password. Check this knowledge base article which explains how to modify an attribute of an user in active directory. It just talks about the properties needed by the FTP user isolation, just modify the code to use your own attribute.

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  • ASP.NET - Enabling PasswordReset functionality when using ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider

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    If you want to use ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider on your website to manage users specially the password reset functionality, you will also need to create few attributes in the active directory schema for the "USER" object. You can check this MSDN article to know more about this, but again, it doesn't list how to create the needed attributes, but it tells you what are all the attributes needed if you are considering "Password Reset" functionality.

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