A Guided Garden Stroll through the .NET Framework Class Library

Namespace: SYSTEM.SECURITY

● I am the Security* Namespace and I am most famous to application developers for my Encryption and Decryption abilities. But I cover much, much more.

Whenever managed code runs on a computer, an extensive level of security checks occur, mostly behind the scenes. For example, I have a CodeAccessPermision class that walks the call stack to ensure that all callers have permission to access the code being requested to run. Most of this functionality is called via my SecurityManager class which has methods such as CheckExecutionRights.

In the System.Security.Policy namespace are classes used to check the extensive evidenced based security policies of the executing code. If you’ve ever encountered a problem running a .NET application that resides on a file server on your network, then it’s this evidence based policy that is keeping the application from running. Use the Microsoft .NET Framework Configuration MMC Snap-In to adjust the .NET security policies for your machine or for your enterprise.

The System.Security.Cryptography* namespace, of course, contains the classes and members that enable you to secure data through various forms of encrypting and decrypting data.

I also contain a System.Security.Cryptography.XML namespace which is used primarily for digitally signing .NET XML objects.