Summary

Next to your application performing quickly and looking good, one of the most important things that your application can do is be secure.

Not only do you need to defend your website against hackers, which is something that you do as an application developer and the IT folks do at a network level, but you need to defend your users against other malicious attackers and intruders. User passwords need to be secure, and connection strings to the database need to be secure.

In addition, you need to be able to authenticate your own users and identify the roles to which they belong so that you can determine what functionality to provide for them.

After going through this chapter, you should now have a good idea of what it takes to authenticate users, provide custom role-based security implementations, and use encryption and hashing techniques to protect your data and the sensitive information belonging to your users.