Summary

Security is an enormous topic, and many books are devoted exclusively to explaining cryptography standards and concepts. This chapter considered the fundamentals of integrating security into your distributed applications. It began with an overview of custom and Windows-based authentication and considered the common ticket system design pattern. For an example of custom authentication in action, you can refer to the case study in Chapter 18.

This chapter also explored encryption and how you can protect sensitive data over the wire with SSL or the .NET cryptography classes. Clearly, the heavy lifting required with custom encryption code means it isn't for everyone. In fact, it's dangerously close to so-called infrastructure programming, which can detract from the design of more important business-specific parts of your application. You can rest assured that the security tasks you've learned about in this chapter will become more automated as XML Web services evolve and Microsoft builds new features into future .NET releases.