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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Creating your first sealed document

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g indexThe previous articles in this guide have detailed how to install, configure and secure your Oracle IRM 11g service. This article walks you through the process of now creating your first context and securing a document against it. I should mention that it would be worth reviewing the following to ensure your installation is ready for that all important first document. Ensure you have correctly configured the keystore for the IRM wrapper keys. If this is not correctly configured, creating the context below will fail. Make sure the IRM server URL correctly resolves and uses the right protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) ContentsCreate the first contextInstall the Oracle IRM Desktop Seal your first document Create the first contextIn Oracle 11g there is a built in classification and rights system called the "standard rights model" which is based on 10 years of customer use cases and innovation. It is a system which enables IRM to scale massively whilst retaining the ability to balance security and usability and also separate duties by allowing contacts in the business to own classifications. The final article in this guide goes into detail on this inbuilt classification model, but for the purposes of this current article all we need to do is create at least one context to test our system out.With a new IRM server there are a set of predefined context templates and roles which again are setup in a way which reflects the most common use we've learned from our customers. We will use these out of the box configurations as they are to create the first context against which we will seal some content.First login to your Oracle IRM Management Website located at https://irm.company.com/irm_rights/. Currently the system is only configured to use the built in LDAP for users, so use the only account we have at the moment, which by default is weblogic. Once logged in switch to the Contexts tab. Click on the New Context icon () in the menu bar on the left. In the resulting dialog select the Standard context template and enter in a name for the context. Then just hit finish, the weblogic account will automatically be made the manager. You'll now see your brand new context ready for users to be assigned. Now click on the Assign Role icon () in the menu bar and in the resulting dialog search for your only user account, weblogic, and add to the list on the right. Now select a role for this user. Because we need to create a document with this user we must select contributor, as this is the only role which allows for the ability to seal. Finally hit next and then finish. We now have a context with a user that has the rights to create a document. The next step is to configure the IRM Desktop to get these rights from the server. Install the Oracle IRM Desktop Before we can seal a document we need the client software installed. Oracle IRM has a very small, lightweight client called the Oracle IRM Desktop which can be freely downloaded in 27 languages from here. Double click on the installer and click on next... Next again... And finally on install... Very easy. You may get a warning about closing Outlook, Word or another application and most of the time no reboots are required. Once it is installed you will see the IRM Desktop icon running in your tool tray, bottom right of the desktop. Seal your first document Finally the prize is within reach, creating your first sealed document. The server is running, we've got a context ready, a user assigned a role in the context but there is the simple and obvious hoop left to jump through. To seal a document we need to have the users rights cached to the local machine. For this to take place, the IRM Desktop needs to know where the Oracle IRM server is on the network so we can synchronize these rights and then be able to seal a document. The usual way for the IRM Desktop to know about the IRM server is it learns automatically when you open an existing piece of content that someone has sent you... ack. Bit of a chicken or the egg dilemma. The solution is to manually tell the IRM Desktop the location of the IRM Server and then force a synchronization of rights. Right click on the Oracle IRM Desktop icon in the system tray and select Options.... Then switch to the Servers tab in the resulting dialog. There are no servers in the list because you've never opened any content. This list is usually populated automatically but we are going to add a server manually, so click on New.... Into the dialog enter in the full URL to the IRM server. Note that this time you use the path /irm_desktop/ and not /irm_rights/. You can see an example from the image below. Click on the validate button and you'll be asked to authenticate. Enter in your weblogic username and password and also check the Remember my password check box. Click OK and the IRM Desktop will confirm a successful connection to the server. OK all the dialogs and we are ready to Synchronize this users rights to the desktop. Right click once more on the Oracle IRM Desktop icon in the system tray. Now the Synchronize menu option is available. Select this and the IRM Desktop will now talk to the IRM server, authenticate using your weblogic account and get your rights to the context we created. Because this is the first time this users has communicated with the IRM server the IRM Desktop presents a privacy policy dialog. This is a chance for the business to ask users to agree to any policy about the use of IRM before opening secured documents. In our guide we've not bothered to setup this URL so just click on the check box and hit Accept. The IRM Desktop will then talk to the server, get your rights and display a success dialog. Lets protect a documentNow we are ready to seal a piece of content. In my guide i'm going to protect a Microsoft Word document. This mean's I have to have copy of Office installed, in this guide i'm using Microsoft Office 2007. You could also seal a PDF document, you'll need to download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader. A very simple test could be to seal a GIF/JPG/PNG or piece of HTML because this is rendered using Internet Explorer. But as I say, i'm going to protect a Word document. The following example demonstrates choosing a file in Windows Explorer, there are many ways to seal a file and you can watch a few in this video.Open a copy of Windows Explorer and locate the file you wish to seal. Right click on the document and select Seal To -> Context You are now presented with the Select Context dialog. You'll now have a sealed copy of the document sat in the same location. Double click on this document and it will open, again using the credentials you've already provided. That is it, now you just need to add more users, more documents, more classifications and start exploring the different roles and experiment with different offline periods etc. You may wish to setup the server against an existing LDAP or Active Directory environment instead of using the built in WebLogic LDAP store. You can read how to use your corporate directory here. But before we finish this guide, there is one more article and arguably the most important article of all. Next I discuss the all important decision making surrounding the actually implementation of Oracle IRM inside your business. Who has rights to what? How do you map contexts to your existing business practices? It is the next article which actually ensures you deploy a successful IRM solution by looking at the business and understanding how they use your sensitive information and then configuring Oracle IRM to reflect their use.

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Classification design

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g indexThis is the final article in the quick guide to Oracle IRM. If you've followed everything prior you will now have a fully functional and tested Information Rights Management service. It doesn't matter if you've been following the 10g or 11g guide as this next article is common to both. ContentsWhy this is the most important part... Understanding the classification and standard rights model Identifying business use cases Creating an effective IRM classification modelOne single classification across the entire businessA context for each and every possible granular use caseWhat makes a good context? Deciding on the use of roles in the context Reviewing the features and security for context roles Summary Why this is the most important part...Now the real work begins, installing and getting an IRM system running is as simple as following instructions. However to actually have an IRM technology easily protecting your most sensitive information without interfering with your users existing daily work flows and be able to scale IRM across the entire business, requires thought into how confidential documents are created, used and distributed. This article is going to give you the information you need to ask the business the right questions so that you can deploy your IRM service successfully. The IRM team here at Oracle have over 10 years of experience in helping customers and it is important you understand the following to be successful in securing access to your most confidential information. Whatever you are trying to secure, be it mergers and acquisitions information, engineering intellectual property, health care documentation or financial reports. No matter what type of user is going to access the information, be they employees, contractors or customers, there are common goals you are always trying to achieve.Securing the content at the earliest point possible and do it automatically. Removing the dependency on the user to decide to secure the content reduces the risk of mistakes significantly and therefore results a more secure deployment. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) Reduce complexity in the rights/classification model. Oracle IRM lets you make changes to access to documents even after they are secured which allows you to start with a simple model and then introduce complexity once you've understood how the technology is going to be used in the business. After an initial learning period you can review your implementation and start to make informed decisions based on user feedback and administration experience. Clearly communicate to the user, when appropriate, any changes to their existing work practice. You must make every effort to make the transition to sealed content as simple as possible. For external users you must help them understand why you are securing the documents and inform them the value of the technology to both your business and them. Before getting into the detail, I must pay homage to Martin White, Vice President of client services in SealedMedia, the company Oracle acquired and who created Oracle IRM. In the SealedMedia years Martin was involved with every single customer and was key to the design of certain aspects of the IRM technology, specifically the context model we will be discussing here. Listening carefully to customers and understanding the flexibility of the IRM technology, Martin taught me all the skills of helping customers build scalable, effective and simple to use IRM deployments. No matter how well the engineering department designed the software, badly designed and poorly executed projects can result in difficult to use and manage, and ultimately insecure solutions. The advice and information that follows was born with Martin and he's still delivering IRM consulting with customers and can be found at www.thinkers.co.uk. It is from Martin and others that Oracle not only has the most advanced, scalable and usable document security solution on the market, but Oracle and their partners have the most experience in delivering successful document security solutions. Understanding the classification and standard rights model The goal of any successful IRM deployment is to balance the increase in security the technology brings without over complicating the way people use secured content and avoid a significant increase in administration and maintenance. With Oracle it is possible to automate the protection of content, deploy the desktop software transparently and use authentication methods such that users can open newly secured content initially unaware the document is any different to an insecure one. That is until of course they attempt to do something for which they don't have any rights, such as copy and paste to an insecure application or try and print. Central to achieving this objective is creating a classification model that is simple to understand and use but also provides the right level of complexity to meet the business needs. In Oracle IRM the term used for each classification is a "context". A context defines the relationship between.A group of related documents The people that use the documents The roles that these people perform The rights that these people need to perform their role The context is the key to the success of Oracle IRM. It provides the separation of the role and rights of a user from the content itself. Documents are sealed to contexts but none of the rights, user or group information is stored within the content itself. Sealing only places information about the location of the IRM server that sealed it, the context applied to the document and a few other pieces of metadata that pertain only to the document. This important separation of rights from content means that millions of documents can be secured against a single classification and a user needs only one right assigned to be able to access all documents. If you have followed all the previous articles in this guide, you will be ready to start defining contexts to which your sensitive information will be protected. But before you even start with IRM, you need to understand how your own business uses and creates sensitive documents and emails. Identifying business use cases Oracle is able to support multiple classification systems, but usually there is one single initial need for the technology which drives a deployment. This need might be to protect sensitive mergers and acquisitions information, engineering intellectual property, financial documents. For this and every subsequent use case you must understand how users create and work with documents, to who they are distributed and how the recipients should interact with them. A successful IRM deployment should start with one well identified use case (we go through some examples towards the end of this article) and then after letting this use case play out in the business, you learn how your users work with content, how well your communication to the business worked and if the classification system you deployed delivered the right balance. It is at this point you can start rolling the technology out further. Creating an effective IRM classification model Once you have selected the initial use case you will address with IRM, you need to design a classification model that defines the access to secured documents within the use case. In Oracle IRM there is an inbuilt classification system called the "context" model. In Oracle IRM 11g it is possible to extend the server to support any rights classification model, but the majority of users who are not using an application integration (such as Oracle IRM within Oracle Beehive) are likely to be starting out with the built in context model. Before looking at creating a classification system with IRM, it is worth reviewing some recognized standards and methods for creating and implementing security policy. A very useful set of documents are the ISO 17799 guidelines and the SANS security policy templates. First task is to create a context against which documents are to be secured. A context consists of a group of related documents (all top secret engineering research), a list of roles (contributors and readers) which define how users can access documents and a list of users (research engineers) who have been given a role allowing them to interact with sealed content. Before even creating the first context it is wise to decide on a philosophy which will dictate the level of granularity, the question is, where do you start? At a department level? By project? By technology? First consider the two ends of the spectrum... One single classification across the entire business Imagine that instead of having separate contexts, one for engineering intellectual property, one for your financial data, one for human resources personally identifiable information, you create one context for all documents across the entire business. Whilst you may have immediate objections, there are some significant benefits in thinking about considering this. Document security classification decisions are simple. You only have one context to chose from! User provisioning is simple, just make sure everyone has a role in the only context in the business. Administration is very low, if you assign rights to groups from the business user repository you probably never have to touch IRM administration again. There are however some obvious downsides to this model.All users in have access to all IRM secured content. So potentially a sales person could access sensitive mergers and acquisition documents, if they can get their hands on a copy that is. You cannot delegate control of different documents to different parts of the business, this may not satisfy your regulatory requirements for the separation and delegation of duties. Changing a users role affects every single document ever secured. Even though it is very unlikely a business would ever use one single context to secure all their sensitive information, thinking about this scenario raises one very important point. Just having one single context and securing all confidential documents to it, whilst incurring some of the problems detailed above, has one huge value. Once secured, IRM protected content can ONLY be accessed by authorized users. Just think of all the sensitive documents in your business today, imagine if you could ensure that only everyone you trust could open them. Even if an employee lost a laptop or someone accidentally sent an email to the wrong recipient, only the right people could open that file. A context for each and every possible granular use case Now let's think about the total opposite of a single context design. What if you created a context for each and every single defined business need and created multiple contexts within this for each level of granularity? Let's take a use case where we need to protect engineering intellectual property. Imagine we have 6 different engineering groups, and in each we have a research department, a design department and manufacturing. The company information security policy defines 3 levels of information sensitivity... restricted, confidential and top secret. Then let's say that each group and department needs to define access to information from both internal and external users. Finally add into the mix that they want to review the rights model for each context every financial quarter. This would result in a huge amount of contexts. For example, lets just look at the resulting contexts for one engineering group. Q1FY2010 Restricted Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Restricted Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Restricted Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Restricted External- Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Restricted External - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Restricted External - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Confidential Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Confidential Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Confidential Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Confidential External - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Confidential External - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Confidential External - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Top Secret Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Top Secret Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Top Secret Internal - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Q1FY2010 Top Secret External - Engineering Group 1 - Research Q1FY2010 Top Secret External - Engineering Group 1 - Design Q1FY2010 Top Secret External - Engineering Group 1 - Manufacturing Now multiply the above by 6 for each engineering group, 18 contexts. You are then creating/reviewing another 18 every 3 months. After a year you've got 72 contexts. What would be the advantages of such a complex classification model? You can satisfy very granular rights requirements, for example only an authorized engineering group 1 researcher can create a top secret report for access internally, and his role will be reviewed on a very frequent basis. Your business may have very complex rights requirements and mapping this directly to IRM may be an obvious exercise. The disadvantages of such a classification model are significant...Huge administrative overhead. Someone in the business must manage, review and administrate each of these contexts. If the engineering group had a single administrator, they would have 72 classifications to reside over each year. From an end users perspective life will be very confusing. Imagine if a user has rights in just 6 of these contexts. They may be able to print content from one but not another, be able to edit content in 2 contexts but not the other 4. Such confusion at the end user level causes frustration and resistance to the use of the technology. Increased synchronization complexity. Imagine a user who after 3 years in the company ends up with over 300 rights in many different contexts across the business. This would result in long synchronization times as the client software updates all your offline rights. Hard to understand who can do what with what. Imagine being the VP of engineering and as part of an internal security audit you are asked the question, "What rights to researchers have to our top secret information?". In this complex model the answer is not simple, it would depend on many roles in many contexts. Of course this example is extreme, but it highlights that trying to build many barriers in your business can result in a nightmare of administration and confusion amongst users. In the real world what we need is a balance of the two. We need to seek an optimum number of contexts. Too many contexts are unmanageable and too few contexts does not give fine enough granularity. What makes a good context? Good context design derives mainly from how well you understand your business requirements to secure access to confidential information. Some customers I have worked with can tell me exactly the documents they wish to secure and know exactly who should be opening them. However there are some customers who know only of the government regulation that requires them to control access to certain types of information, they don't actually know where the documents are, how they are created or understand exactly who should have access. Therefore you need to know how to ask the business the right questions that lead to information which help you define a context. First ask these questions about a set of documentsWhat is the topic? Who are legitimate contributors on this topic? Who are the authorized readership? If the answer to any one of these is significantly different, then it probably merits a separate context. Remember that sealed documents are inherently secure and as such they cannot leak to your competitors, therefore it is better sealed to a broad context than not sealed at all. Simplicity is key here. Always revert to the first extreme example of a single classification, then work towards essential complexity. If there is any doubt, always prefer fewer contexts. Remember, Oracle IRM allows you to change your mind later on. You can implement a design now and continue to change and refine as you learn how the technology is used. It is easy to go from a simple model to a more complex one, it is much harder to take a complex model that is already embedded in the work practice of users and try to simplify it. It is also wise to take a single use case and address this first with the business. Don't try and tackle many different problems from the outset. Do one, learn from the process, refine it and then take what you have learned into the next use case, refine and continue. Once you have a good grasp of the technology and understand how your business will use it, you can then start rolling out the technology wider across the business. Deciding on the use of roles in the context Once you have decided on that first initial use case and a context to create let's look at the details you need to decide upon. For each context, identify; Administrative rolesBusiness owner, the person who makes decisions about who may or may not see content in this context. This is often the person who wanted to use IRM and drove the business purchase. They are the usually the person with the most at risk when sensitive information is lost. Point of contact, the person who will handle requests for access to content. Sometimes the same as the business owner, sometimes a trusted secretary or administrator. Context administrator, the person who will enact the decisions of the Business Owner. Sometimes the point of contact, sometimes a trusted IT person. Document related rolesContributors, the people who create and edit documents in this context. Reviewers, the people who are involved in reviewing documents but are not trusted to secure information to this classification. This role is not always necessary. (See later discussion on Published-work and Work-in-Progress) Readers, the people who read documents from this context. Some people may have several of the roles above, which is fine. What you are trying to do is understand and define how the business interacts with your sensitive information. These roles obviously map directly to roles available in Oracle IRM. Reviewing the features and security for context roles At this point we have decided on a classification of information, understand what roles people in the business will play when administrating this classification and how they will interact with content. The final piece of the puzzle in getting the information for our first context is to look at the permissions people will have to sealed documents. First think why are you protecting the documents in the first place? It is to prevent the loss of leaking of information to the wrong people. To control the information, making sure that people only access the latest versions of documents. You are not using Oracle IRM to prevent unauthorized people from doing legitimate work. This is an important point, with IRM you can erect many barriers to prevent access to content yet too many restrictions and authorized users will often find ways to circumvent using the technology and end up distributing unprotected originals. Because IRM is a security technology, it is easy to get carried away restricting different groups. However I would highly recommend starting with a simple solution with few restrictions. Ensure that everyone who reasonably needs to read documents can do so from the outset. Remember that with Oracle IRM you can change rights to content whenever you wish and tighten security. Always return to the fact that the greatest value IRM brings is that ONLY authorized users can access secured content, remember that simple "one context for the entire business" model. At the start of the deployment you really need to aim for user acceptance and therefore a simple model is more likely to succeed. As time passes and users understand how IRM works you can start to introduce more restrictions and complexity. Another key aspect to focus on is handling exceptions. If you decide on a context model where engineering can only access engineering information, and sales can only access sales data. Act quickly when a sales manager needs legitimate access to a set of engineering documents. Having a quick and effective process for permitting other people with legitimate needs to obtain appropriate access will be rewarded with acceptance from the user community. These use cases can often be satisfied by integrating IRM with a good Identity & Access Management technology which simplifies the process of assigning users the correct business roles. The big print issue... Printing is often an issue of contention, users love to print but the business wants to ensure sensitive information remains in the controlled digital world. There are many cases of physical document loss causing a business pain, it is often overlooked that IRM can help with this issue by limiting the ability to generate physical copies of digital content. However it can be hard to maintain a balance between security and usability when it comes to printing. Consider the following points when deciding about whether to give print rights. Oracle IRM sealed documents can contain watermarks that expose information about the user, time and location of access and the classification of the document. This information would reside in the printed copy making it easier to trace who printed it. Printed documents are slower to distribute in comparison to their digital counterparts, so time sensitive information in printed format may present a lower risk. Print activity is audited, therefore you can monitor and react to users abusing print rights. Summary In summary it is important to think carefully about the way you create your context model. As you ask the business these questions you may get a variety of different requirements. There may be special projects that require a context just for sensitive information created during the lifetime of the project. There may be a department that requires all information in the group is secured and you might have a few senior executives who wish to use IRM to exchange a small number of highly sensitive documents with a very small number of people. Oracle IRM, with its very flexible context classification system, can support all of these use cases. The trick is to introducing the complexity to deliver them at the right level. In another article i'm working on I will go through some examples of how Oracle IRM might map to existing business use cases. But for now, this article covers all the important questions you need to get your IRM service deployed and successfully protecting your most sensitive information.

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• Protecting offline IRM rights and the error "Unable to Connect to Offline database"

  - by Simon Thorpe

  One of the most common problems I get asked about Oracle IRM is in relation to the error message "Unable to Connect to Offline database". This error message is a result of how Oracle IRM is protecting the cached rights on the local machine and if that cache has become invalid in anyway, this error is thrown. Offline rights and security First we need to understand how Oracle IRM handles offline use. The way it is implemented is one of the main reasons why Oracle IRM is the leading document security solution and demonstrates our methodology to ensure that solutions address both security and usability and puts the balance of these two in your control. Each classification has a set of predefined roles that the manager of the classification can assign to users. Each role has an offline period which determines the amount of time a user can access content without having to communicate with the IRM server. By default for the context model, which is the classification system that ships out of the box with Oracle IRM, the offline period for each role is 3 days. This is easily changed however and can be as low as under an hour to as long as years. It is also possible to switch off the ability to access content offline which can be useful when content is very sensitive and requires a tight leash. So when a user is online, transparently in the background, the Oracle IRM Desktop communicates with the server and updates the users rights and offline periods. This transparent synchronization period is determined by the server and communicated to all IRM Desktops and allows for users rights to be kept up to date without their intervention. This allows us to support some very important scenarios which are key to a successful IRM solution. A user doesn't have to make any decision when going offline, they simply unplug their laptop and they already have their offline periods synchronized to the maximum values. Any solution that requires a user to make a decision at the point of going offline isn't going to work because people forget to do this and will therefore be unable to legitimately access their content offline. If your rights change to REMOVE your access to content, this also happens in the background. This is very useful when someone has an offline duration of a week and they happen to make a connection to the internet 3 days into that offline period, the Oracle IRM Desktop detects this online state and automatically updates all rights for the user. This means the business risk is reduced when setting long offline periods, because of the daily transparent sync, you can reflect changes as soon as the user is online. Of course, if they choose not to come online at all during that week offline period, you cannot effect change, but you take that risk in giving the 7 day offline period in the first place. If you are added to a NEW classification during the day, this will automatically be synchronized without the user even having to open a piece of content secured against that classification. This is very important, consider the scenario where a senior executive downloads all their email but doesn't open any of it. Disconnects the laptop and then gets on a plane. During the flight they attempt to open a document attached to a downloaded email which has been secured against an IRM classification the user was not even aware they had access to. Because their new role in this classification was automatically synchronized their experience is a good one and the document opens. More information on how the Oracle IRM classification model works can be found in this article by Martin Abrahams. So what about problems accessing the offline rights database? So onto the core issue... when these rights are cached to your machine they are stored in an encrypted database. The encryption of this offline database is keyed to the instance of the installation of the IRM Desktop and the Windows user account. Why? Well what you do not want to happen is for someone to get their rights for content and then copy these files across hundreds of other machines, therefore getting access to sensitive content across many environments. The IRM server has a setting which controls how many times you can cache these rights on unique machines. This is because people typically access IRM content on more than one computer. Their work desktop, a laptop and often a home computer. So Oracle IRM allows for the usability of caching rights on more than one computer whilst retaining strong security over this cache. So what happens if these files are corrupted in someway? That's when you will see the error, Unable to Connect to Offline database. The most common instance of seeing this is when you are using virtual machines and copy them from one computer to the next. The virtual machine software, VMWare Workstation for example, makes changes to the unique information of that virtual machine and as such invalidates the offline database. How do you solve the problem? Resolution is however simple. You just delete all of the offline database files on the machine and they will be recreated with working encryption when the Oracle IRM Desktop next starts. However this does mean that the IRM server will think you have your rights cached to more than one computer and you will need to rerequest your rights, even though you are only going to be accessing them on one. Because it still thinks the old cache is valid. So be aware, it is good practice to increase the server limit from the default of 1 to say 3 or 4. This is done using the Enterprise Manager instance of IRM. So to delete these offline files I have a simple .bat file you can use; Download DeleteOfflineDBs.bat Note that this uses pskillto stop the irmBackground.exe from running. This is part of the IRM Desktop and holds open a lock to the offline database. Either kill this from task manager or use pskillas part of the script.

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• To 'seal' or to 'wrap': that is the question ...

  - by Simon Thorpe

  If you follow this blog you will already have a good idea of what Oracle Information Rights Management (IRM) does. By encrypting documents Oracle IRM secures and tracks all copies of those documents, everywhere they are shared, stored and used, inside and outside your firewall. Unlike earlier encryption products authorized end users can transparently use IRM-encrypted documents within standard desktop applications such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer, etc. without first having to manually decrypt the documents. Oracle refers to this encryption process as 'sealing', and it is thanks to the freely available Oracle IRM Desktop that end users can transparently open 'sealed' documents within desktop applications without needing to know they are encrypted and without being able to save them out in unencrypted form. So Oracle IRM provides an amazing, unprecedented capability to secure and track every copy of your most sensitive information - even enabling end user access to be revoked long after the documents have been copied to home computers or burnt to CD/DVDs. But what doesn't it do? The main limitation of Oracle IRM (and IRM products in general) is format and platform support. Oracle IRM supports by far the broadest range of desktop applications and the deepest range of application versions, compared to other IRM vendors. This is important because you don't want to exclude sensitive business processes from being 'sealed' just because either the file format is not supported or users cannot upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Office or Adobe Reader. But even the Oracle IRM Desktop can only open 'sealed' documents on Windows and does not for example currently support CAD (although this is coming in a future release). IRM products from other vendors are much more restrictive. To address this limitation Oracle has just made available the Oracle IRM Wrapper all-format, any-platform encryption/decryption utility. It uses the same core Oracle IRM web services and classification-based rights model to manually encrypt and decrypt files of any format on any Java-capable operating system. The encryption envelope is the same, and it uses the same role- and classification-based rights as 'sealing', but before you can use 'wrapped' files you must manually decrypt them. Essentially it is old-school manual encryption/decryption using the modern classification-based rights model of Oracle IRM. So if you want to share sensitive CAD documents, ZIP archives, media files, etc. with a partner, and you already have Oracle IRM, it's time to get 'wrapping'! Please note that the Oracle IRM Wrapper is made available as a free sample application (with full source code) and is not formally supported by Oracle. However it is informally supported by its author, Martin Lambert, who also created the widely-used Oracle IRM Hot Folder automated sealing application.

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• Subterranean IL: Pseudo custom attributes

  - by Simon Cooper

  Custom attributes were designed to make the .NET framework extensible; if a .NET language needs to store additional metadata on an item that isn't expressible in IL, then an attribute could be applied to the IL item to represent this metadata. For instance, the C# compiler uses DecimalConstantAttribute and DateTimeConstantAttribute to represent compile-time decimal or datetime constants, which aren't allowed in pure IL, and FixedBufferAttribute to represent fixed struct fields. How attributes are compiled Within a .NET assembly are a series of tables containing all the metadata for items within the assembly; for instance, the TypeDef table stores metadata on all the types in the assembly, and MethodDef does the same for all the methods and constructors. Custom attribute information is stored in the CustomAttribute table, which has references to the IL item the attribute is applied to, the constructor used (which implies the type of attribute applied), and a binary blob representing the arguments and name/value pairs used in the attribute application. For example, the following C# class: [Obsolete("Please use MyClass2", true)] public class MyClass { // ... } corresponds to the following IL class definition: .class public MyClass { .custom instance void [mscorlib]System.ObsoleteAttribute::.ctor(string, bool) = { string('Please use MyClass2' bool(true) } // ... } and results in the following entry in the CustomAttribute table: TypeDef(MyClass) MemberRef(ObsoleteAttribute::.ctor(string, bool)) blob -> {string('Please use MyClass2' bool(true)} However, there are some attributes that don't compile in this way. Pseudo custom attributes Just like there are some concepts in a language that can't be represented in IL, there are some concepts in IL that can't be represented in a language. This is where pseudo custom attributes come into play. The most obvious of these is SerializableAttribute. Although it looks like an attribute, it doesn't compile to a CustomAttribute table entry; it instead sets the serializable bit directly within the TypeDef entry for the type. This flag is fully expressible within IL; this C#: [Serializable] public class MySerializableClass {} compiles to this IL: .class public serializable MySerializableClass {} For those interested, a full list of pseudo custom attributes is available here. For the rest of this post, I'll be concentrating on the ones that deal with P/Invoke. P/Invoke attributes P/Invoke is built right into the CLR at quite a deep level; there are 2 metadata tables within an assembly dedicated solely to p/invoke interop, and many more that affect it. Furthermore, all the attributes used to specify p/invoke methods in C# or VB have their own keywords and syntax within IL. For example, the following C# method declaration: [DllImport("mscorsn.dll", SetLastError = true)] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] private static extern bool StrongNameSignatureVerificationEx( [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)] string wszFilePath, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] bool fForceVerification, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] ref bool pfWasVerified); compiles to the following IL definition: .method private static pinvokeimpl("mscorsn.dll" lasterr winapi) bool marshal(unsigned int8) StrongNameSignatureVerificationEx( string marshal(lpwstr) wszFilePath, bool marshal(unsigned int8) fForceVerification, bool& marshal(unsigned int8) pfWasVerified) cil managed preservesig {} As you can see, all the p/invoke and marshal properties are specified directly in IL, rather than using attributes. And, rather than creating entries in CustomAttribute, a whole bunch of metadata is emitted to represent this information. This single method declaration results in the following metadata being output to the assembly: A MethodDef entry containing basic information on the method Four ParamDef entries for the 3 method parameters and return type An entry in ModuleRef to mscorsn.dll An entry in ImplMap linking ModuleRef and MethodDef, along with the name of the function to import and the pinvoke options (lasterr winapi) Four FieldMarshal entries containing the marshal information for each parameter. Phew! Applying attributes Most of the time, when you apply an attribute to an element, an entry in the CustomAttribute table will be created to represent that application. However, some attributes represent concepts in IL that aren't expressible in the language you're coding in, and can instead result in a single bit change (SerializableAttribute and NonSerializedAttribute), or many extra metadata table entries (the p/invoke attributes) being emitted to the output assembly.

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• Oracle Database Security Protecting the Oracle IRM Schema

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Acquiring the Information Rights Management technology in 2006 was part of Oracle's strategic security vision and IRM compliments nicely the overall Oracle security set of solutions. A year ago I spoke about how Oracle has solutions that can help companies protect information throughout its entire life cycle. With our acquisition of Sun this set of solutions has solidified and has even extended down to the operating system and hardware level. Oracle can now offer customers technology that protects their data from the disk, through the database to documents on the desktop! With the recent release of Oracle IRM 11g I was tasked to configure demonstration and evaluation environments and I thought it would make a nice story to leverage some of the security features in the latest release of the Oracle Database. After building these environments I thought I would put together a simple video demonstrating how both Database Advanced Security and Information Rights Management combined can provide a very secure platform for protecting your information. Have a look at the following which highlights these database security options.Transparent Data Encryption protecting the communication from the Oracle IRM server to the Database server. Encryption techniques provide confidentiality and integrity of the data passing to and from the IRM service on the back end. Transparent Data Encryption protecting the Oracle IRM database schema. Encryption is used to provide confidentiality of the IRM data whilst it resides at rest in the database table space. Database Vault is used to ensure only the Oracle IRM service has access to query and update the information that resides in the database. This is an excellent method of ensuring that database administrators cannot look at or make changes to the Oracle IRM database whilst retaining their ability to administrate the database. The last thing you want after deploying an IRM solution is for a curious or unhappy DBA to run a query that grants them rights to your company financial data or documents pertaining to a merger or acquisition.

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Server installation

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index This is the first of a set of articles designed to assist with the successful installation, configuration and deployment of a document security solution using Oracle IRM. This article goes through a set of simple instructions which detail how to download, install and configure the IRM server, the starting point for building a document security solution. This article contains a subset of information from the official documentation and is focused on installing the server on Oracle Enterprise Linux. If you are planning to deploy on a non-Linux platform, you will need to reference the documentation for platform specific information. Contents Introduction Downloading the software Preparing a database Creating the schema WebLogic Server installation Installing Oracle IRM Introduction Because we are using Oracle Enterprise Linux in this guide, and before we get into the detail of IRM, i'd like to share some tips with Linux to make life a bit easier.Use a 64bit platform, IRM 11g runs just fine on a 32bit server but with 64bit you will build a more future proof service. Download and install the latest Java JDK package. Make sure you get the 64bit version if you are on a 64bit server. Configure Linux to use a good Yum server to simplify installing packages. For Oracle Enterprise Linux we maintain a great public Yum here. Have at least 20GB of free disk space on the partition you intend to install the IRM server. The downloads are big, then you extract them and then install. This quickly consumes disk space which you can easily recover by deleting the downloaded and extracted files after wards. But it's nice to have the disk space spare to keep these around in case you need to restart any part of the installation process again. Downloading the software OK, so before you can do anything, you need the software install kits. Luckily Oracle allows you to freely download every technology we create. You'll need to get the following; Oracle WebLogic Server Oracle Database Oracle Repository Creation Utility (rcu) Oracle IRM server You can use Microsoft SQL server 2005 or 2008, in this guide i've used Oracle RDBMS 11gR2 for Linux. Preparing the database I'm not going to go through the finer points of installing the database. There are many very good guides on installing the Oracle Database. However one thing I would suggest you think about is enabling TDE, network encryption and using Database Vault. These Oracle database security technologies are excellent for creating a complete end to end security solution. No point in going to all the effort to secure document access with IRM when someone can go directly to the database and assign themselves rights to documents. To understand this further, you can see a video of the IRM service using these database security technologies here. With a database up and running we need to create a schema to hold the IRM data. This schema contains the rights model, cryptographic keys, user account id's and associated rights etc. Creating the IRM database schema Oracle uses the Repository Creation Tool which builds your schema, extract the files from the rcu zip. Then in a terminal window; cd /oracle/install/rcu/bin ./rcu This will launch the Repository Creation Tool and you will be presented with the image to the right. Hit next and continue onto the next dialog. You are asked if you are going to be creating a new schema or wish to drop an existing one, you obviously just need to click next at this point to create a new schema. The RCU next needs to know where your database is so you'll need the following details of your database instance. Below, for reference, is the information for my installation. Hostname: irm.oracle.demo Port: 1521 (This is the default TCP port for the Oracle Database) Service Name: irm.oracle.demo. Note this is not the SID, but the service name. Username: sys Password: ******** Role: SYSDBA And then select next. Because the RCU contains schemas for many of the Oracle Technologies, you now need to select to just deploy the Oracle IRM schema. Open the section under "Enterprise Content Management" and tick the "Oracle Information Rights Management" component. Note that you also get the chance to select a prefix which defaults to "DEV" (for development). I usually change this to something that reflects my own install. PROD for a production system, INT for internal only etc. The next step asks for the passwords for the schema users. We are only creating one schema here so you just enter one password. Some brave souls store this password in an Excel spreadsheet which is then secure against the IRM server you're about to install in this guide. Nearing the end of the schema creation is the mapping of the tablespaces to the schema. Note I had setup a table space already that was encrypted using TDE and at this point I was able to select that tablespace by clicking in the "Default Tablespace" column. The next dialog confirms your actions and clicking on next causes it to create the schema and default data. After this you are presented with the completion summary. WebLogic Server installation The database is now ready and the next step is to install the application server. Oracle IRM 11g is a JEE application and currently only supported in Oracle WebLogic Server. So the next step is get WebLogic Server installed, which is pretty easy. Depending on the version you download, you either run the binary or for a 64 bit platform (like mine) run the following command. java -d64 -jar wls1033_generic.jar And in the resulting dialog hit next to start walking through the install. Next choose a directory into which you will install WebLogic Server. I like to change from the default and install into /oracle/. Then all my software goes into this one folder, all owned by the "oracle" user. The next dialog asks for your Oracle support information to ensure you are kept up to date. If you have an Oracle support account, enter your details but for most evaluation systems I leave these fields blank. Again, for evaluation or development systems, I usually stick with the "Typical" install type which you are next asked for. Next you are asked for the JDK which will be used for the server. When installing from the generic jar on a 64bit platform like in this guide, no JDK is bundled with the installer. But as you can see in the image on the right, that it does a good job of detecting the one you've got installed. Defaults for the install directories are usually taken, no changes here, just click next. And finally we are ready to install, hit next, sit back and relax. Typically this takes about 10 minutes. After the install, do not run the quick start, we need to deploy the IRM install itself from which we will create a new WebLogic domain. For now just hit done and lets move to the final step of the installation process. Installing Oracle IRM The last piece of the puzzle to getting your environment ready is to deploy the IRM files themselves. Unzip the Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g zip file and it will create a Disk1 directory. Switch to this folder and in the console run ./runInstaller. This will launch the installer which will also ask for the location of the JDK. Look at the image on the right for the detail. You should now see the first stage of the IRM installation. The dialog warns you need to have a WebLogic server installed and have created the schema's, but you've just done all that above (I hope) so we are ready to go. The installer now checks that you have all the required libraries installed and other system parameters are correct. Because nearly all of my development and evaluation installations have the database server on the same system, the installer passes these checks without issue... Next... Now chose where to install the IRM files, you must install into the same Middleware Home as the WebLogic Server installation you just performed. Usually the installer already defaults to this location anyway. I also tend to change the Oracle Home Directory to Oracle_IRM so it's clear this is just an IRM install. The summary page tells you about space needed to deploy the files. Unfortunately the IRM install comes with all of the other Oracle ECM software, you can't just select the IRM files, everything gets deployed to disk and uses 1.6GB of space! Not fun, but Oracle has to package up similar technologies otherwise we would have a very large number of installers to QA and manage, again, not fun. Hit Install, time for another drink, maybe a piece of cake or a donut... on a half decent system this part of the install took under 10 minutes. Finally the installation of your IRM server is complete, click on finish and the next phase is to create the WebLogic domain and start configuring your server. Now move onto the next article in this guide... configuring your IRM server ready to seal your first document.

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• Inside Red Gate - Exercises in Leanness

  - by Simon Cooper

  There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed at the correct market, or didn't solve the problem the user had (although they solved the problem we thought the users had, or the problem the users thought they had). As a result, these products weren't as successful as they could have been. The ideas at the core of the Lean Startup help to combat this tendency to build large, well-engineered products that solve the wrong problem. You need to actually test your hypotheses about what the users and the market needs, rather than just running a project based on those untested assumptions. Furthermore, these tests need to be done as fast as possible (on the order of a week) so that, if necessary, you can change the direction of the project without wasting effort going down a dead end. Over time, as more tests are done and more hypotheses are confirmed or refuted, the project moves towards something that solves users' actual problems. However, re-aligning the development teams that operate within Red Gate along these lines does itself have some issues; we've got very good at doing large, monolithic releases, with a feature set decided well in advance. Currently it takes about 2 weeks to do install & release testing before a release; this is clearly not practicable for a team doing weekly, or even daily releases. There's also many infrastructure issues to be solved; in our source control, build system, release mechanism, support pages & documentation, licensing system, update system, and download pages. All these need modifications to allow the fast releases necessary for each experiment. Not only do we have to change our infrastructure, we have to change our mindset. Doing daily releases means each release won't get nearly as much testing as 'standard' releases. As a team, we have to be prepared that there will be releases that have bugs and issues with them; not only do we have to be prepared to change direction with every experiment we do, but we have to be ready to fix any bugs that are reported very quickly as well. The SmartAssembly team is spearheading this move towards leanness within the company, using Feature Usage Reporting (FUR). We think this is a cracking feature that will really help developers learn how people use their products, but we need to confirm this hypothesis. So, over the next few weeks, we'll be running a variety of experiments on SmartAssembly to either confirm or refute our hypotheses concerning how people use SmartAssembly and apply FUR to their own products. In the rest of this series, I'll be documenting how the experiments we perform get on, and our experiences with applying the Lean Startup model to a mature product like SmartAssembly.

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• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentBag

  - by Simon Cooper

  Unlike the other concurrent collections, ConcurrentBag does not really have a non-concurrent analogy. As stated in the MSDN documentation, ConcurrentBag is optimised for the situation where the same thread is both producing and consuming items from the collection. We'll see how this is the case as we take a closer look. Again, I recommend you have ConcurrentBag open in a decompiler for reference. Thread Statics ConcurrentBag makes heavy use of thread statics - static variables marked with ThreadStaticAttribute. This is a special attribute that instructs the CLR to scope any values assigned to or read from the variable to the executing thread, not globally within the AppDomain. This means that if two different threads assign two different values to the same thread static variable, one value will not overwrite the other, and each thread will see the value they assigned to the variable, separately to any other thread. This is a very useful function that allows for ConcurrentBag's concurrency properties. You can think of a thread static variable: [ThreadStatic] private static int m_Value; as doing the same as: private static Dictionary<Thread, int> m_Values; where the executing thread's identity is used to automatically set and retrieve the corresponding value in the dictionary. In .NET 4, this usage of ThreadStaticAttribute is encapsulated in the ThreadLocal class. Lists of lists ConcurrentBag, at its core, operates as a linked list of linked lists: Each outer list node is an instance of ThreadLocalList, and each inner list node is an instance of Node. Each outer ThreadLocalList is owned by a particular thread, accessible through the thread local m_locals variable: private ThreadLocal<ThreadLocalList<T>> m_locals It is important to note that, although the m_locals variable is thread-local, that only applies to accesses through that variable. The objects referenced by the thread (each instance of the ThreadLocalList object) are normal heap objects that are not specific to any thread. Thinking back to the Dictionary analogy above, if each value stored in the dictionary could be accessed by other means, then any thread could access the value belonging to other threads using that mechanism. Only reads and writes to the variable defined as thread-local are re-routed by the CLR according to the executing thread's identity. So, although m_locals is defined as thread-local, the m_headList, m_nextList and m_tailList variables aren't. This means that any thread can access all the thread local lists in the collection by doing a linear search through the outer linked list defined by these variables. Adding items So, onto the collection operations. First, adding items. This one's pretty simple. If the current thread doesn't already own an instance of ThreadLocalList, then one is created (or, if there are lists owned by threads that have stopped, it takes control of one of those). Then the item is added to the head of that thread's list. That's it. Don't worry, it'll get more complicated when we account for the other operations on the list! Taking & Peeking items This is where it gets tricky. If the current thread's list has items in it, then it peeks or removes the head item (not the tail item) from the local list and returns that. However, if the local list is empty, it has to go and steal another item from another list, belonging to a different thread. It iterates through all the thread local lists in the collection using the m_headList and m_nextList variables until it finds one that has items in it, and it steals one item from that list. Up to this point, the two threads had been operating completely independently. To steal an item from another thread's list, the stealing thread has to do it in such a way as to not step on the owning thread's toes. Recall how adding and removing items both operate on the head of the thread's linked list? That gives us an easy way out - a thread trying to steal items from another thread can pop in round the back of another thread's list using the m_tail variable, and steal an item from the back without the owning thread knowing anything about it. The owning thread can carry on completely independently, unaware that one of its items has been nicked. However, this only works when there are at least 3 items in the list, as that guarantees there will be at least one node between the owning thread performing operations on the list head and the thread stealing items from the tail - there's no chance of the two threads operating on the same node at the same time and causing a race condition. If there's less than three items in the list, then there does need to be some synchronization between the two threads. In this case, the lock on the ThreadLocalList object is used to mediate access to a thread's list when there's the possibility of contention. Thread synchronization In ConcurrentBag, this is done using several mechanisms: Operations performed by the owner thread only take out the lock when there are less than three items in the collection. With three or greater items, there won't be any conflict with a stealing thread operating on the tail of the list. If a lock isn't taken out, the owning thread sets the list's m_currentOp variable to a non-zero value for the duration of the operation. This indicates to all other threads that there is a non-locked operation currently occuring on that list. The stealing thread always takes out the lock, to prevent two threads trying to steal from the same list at the same time. After taking out the lock, the stealing thread spinwaits until m_currentOp has been set to zero before actually performing the steal. This ensures there won't be a conflict with the owning thread when the number of items in the list is on the 2-3 item borderline. If any add or remove operations are started in the meantime, and the list is below 3 items, those operations try to take out the list's lock and are blocked until the stealing thread has finished. This allows a thread to steal an item from another thread's list without corrupting it. What about synchronization in the collection as a whole? Collection synchronization Any thread that operates on the collection's global structure (accessing anything outside the thread local lists) has to take out the collection's global lock - m_globalListsLock. This single lock is sufficient when adding a new thread local list, as the items inside each thread's list are unaffected. However, what about operations (such as Count or ToArray) that need to access every item in the collection? In order to ensure a consistent view, all operations on the collection are stopped while the count or ToArray is performed. This is done by freezing the bag at the start, performing the global operation, and unfreezing at the end: The global lock is taken out, to prevent structural alterations to the collection. m_needSync is set to true. This notifies all the threads that they need to take out their list's lock irregardless of what operation they're doing. All the list locks are taken out in order. This blocks all locking operations on the lists. The freezing thread waits for all current lockless operations to finish by spinwaiting on each m_currentOp field. The global operation can then be performed while the bag is frozen, but no other operations can take place at the same time, as all other threads are blocked on a list's lock. Then, once the global operation has finished, the locks are released, m_needSync is unset, and normal concurrent operation resumes. Concurrent principles That's the essence of how ConcurrentBag operates. Each thread operates independently on its own local list, except when they have to steal items from another list. When stealing, only the stealing thread is forced to take out the lock; the owning thread only has to when there is the possibility of contention. And a global lock controls accesses to the structure of the collection outside the thread lists. Operations affecting the entire collection take out all locks in the collection to freeze the contents at a single point in time. So, what principles can we extract here? Threads operate independently Thread-static variables and ThreadLocal makes this easy. Threads operate entirely concurrently on their own structures; only when they need to grab data from another thread is there any thread contention. Minimised lock-taking Even when two threads need to operate on the same data structures (one thread stealing from another), they do so in such a way such that the probability of actually blocking on a lock is minimised; the owning thread always operates on the head of the list, and the stealing thread always operates on the tail. Management of lockless operations Any operations that don't take out a lock still have a 'hook' to force them to lock when necessary. This allows all operations on the collection to be stopped temporarily while a global snapshot is taken. Hopefully, such operations will be short-lived and infrequent. That's all the concurrent collections covered. I hope you've found it as informative and interesting as I have. Next, I'll be taking a closer look at ThreadLocal, which I came across while analyzing ConcurrentBag. As you'll see, the operation of this class deserves a much closer look.

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• .NET vs Windows 8

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, day 1 of DevWeek. Lots and lots of Windows 8 and WinRT, as you would expect. The keynote had some actual content in it, fleshed out some of the details of how your apps linked into the Metro infrastructure, and confirmed that there would indeed be an enterprise version of the app store available for Metro apps.) However, that's, not what I want to focus this post on. What I do want to focus on is this: Windows 8 does not make .NET developers obsolete. Phew! .NET in the New Ecosystem In all the hype around Windows 8 the past few months, a lot of developers have got the impression that .NET has been sidelined in Windows 8; C++ and COM is back in vogue, and HTML5 + JavaScript is the New Way of writing applications. You know .NET? It's yesterday's tech. Enter the 21st Century and write <div>! However, after speaking to people at the conference, and after a couple of talks by Dave Wheeler on the innards of WinRT and how .NET interacts with it, my views on the coming operating system have changed somewhat. To summarize what I've picked up, in no particular order (none of this is official, just my sense of what's been said by various people): Metro apps do not replace desktop apps. That is, Windows 8 fully supports .NET desktop applications written for every other previous version of Windows, and will continue to do so in the forseeable future. There are some apps that simply do not fit into Metro. They do not fit into the touch-based paradigm, and never will. Traditional desktop support is not going away anytime soon. The reason Silverlight has been hidden in all the Metro hype is that Metro is essentially based on Silverlight design principles. Silverlight developers will have a much easier time writing Metro apps than desktop developers, as they would already be used to all the principles of sandboxing and separation introduced with Silverlight. It's desktop developers who are going to have to adapt how they work. .NET + XAML is equal to HTML5 + JS in importance. Although the underlying WinRT system is built on C++ & COM, most application development will be done either using .NET or HTML5. Both systems have their own wrapper around the underlying WinRT infrastructure, hiding the implementation details. The CLR is unchanged; it's still the .NET 4 CLR, running IL in .NET assemblies. The thing that changes between desktop and Metro is the class libraries, which have more in common with the Silverlight libraries than the desktop libraries. In Metro, although all the types look and behave the same to callers, some of the core BCL types are now wrappers around their WinRT equivalents. These wrappers are then enhanced using standard .NET types and code to produce the Metro .NET class libraries. You can't simply port a desktop app into Metro. The underlying file IO, network, timing and database access is either completely different or simply missing. Similarly, although the UI is programmed using XAML, the behaviour of the Metro XAML is different to WPF or Silverlight XAML. Furthermore, the new design principles and touch-based interface for Metro applications demand a completely new UI. You will be able to re-use sections of your app encapsulating pure program logic, but everything else will need to be written from scratch. Microsoft has taken the opportunity to remove a whole raft of types and methods from the Metro framework that are obsolete (non-generic collections) or break the sandbox (synchronous APIs); if you use these, you will have to rewrite to use the alternatives, if they exist at all, to move your apps to Metro. If you want to write public WinRT components in .NET, there are some quite strict rules you have to adhere to. But the compilers know about these rules; you can write them in C# or VB, and the compilers will tell you when you do something that isn't allowed and deal with the translation to WinRT metadata rather than .NET assemblies. It is possible to write a class library that can be used in Metro and desktop applications. However, you need to be very careful not to use types that are available in one but not the other. One can imagine developers writing their own abstraction around file IO and UIs (MVVM anyone?) that can be implemented differently in Metro and desktop, but look the same within your shared library. So, if you're a .NET developer, you have a lot less to worry about. .NET is a viable platform on Metro, and traditional desktop apps are not going away. You don't have to learn HTML5 and JavaScript if you don't want to. Hurray!

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• Big Data: Size isn’t everything

  - by Simon Elliston Ball

  Big Data has a big problem; it’s the word “Big”. These days, a quick Google search will uncover terabytes of negative opinion about the futility of relying on huge volumes of data to produce magical, meaningful insight. There are also many clichéd but correct assertions about the difficulties of correlation versus causation, in massive data sets. In reading some of these pieces, I begin to understand how climatologists must feel when people complain ironically about “global warming” during snowfall. Big Data has a name problem. There is a lot more to it than size. Shape, Speed, and…err…Veracity are also key elements (now I understand why Gartner and the gang went with V’s instead of S’s). The need to handle data of different shapes (Variety) is not new. Data developers have always had to mold strange-shaped data into our reporting systems, integrating with semi-structured sources, and even straying into full-text searching. However, what we lacked was an easy way to add semi-structured and unstructured data to our arsenal. New “Big Data” tools such as MongoDB, and other NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases, or a graph database like Neo4J, fill this gap. Still, to many, they simply introduce noise to the clean signal that is their sensibly normalized data structures. What about speed (Velocity)? It’s not just high frequency trading that generates data faster than a single system can handle. Many other applications need to make trade-offs that traditional databases won’t, in order to cope with high data insert speeds, or to extract quickly the required information from data streams. Unfortunately, many people equate Big Data with the Hadoop platform, whose batch driven queries and job processing queues have little to do with “velocity”. StreamInsight, Esper and Tibco BusinessEvents are examples of Big Data tools designed to handle high-velocity data streams. Again, the name doesn’t do the discipline of Big Data any favors. Ultimately, though, does analyzing fast moving data produce insights as useful as the ones we get through a more considered approach, enabled by traditional BI? Finally, we have Veracity and Value. In many ways, these additions to the classic Volume, Velocity and Variety trio acknowledge the criticism that without high-quality data and genuinely valuable outputs then data, big or otherwise, is worthless. As a discipline, Big Data has recognized this, and data quality and cleaning tools are starting to appear to support it. Rather than simply decrying the irrelevance of Volume, we need as a profession to focus how to improve Veracity and Value. Perhaps we should just declare the ‘Big’ silent, embrace these new data tools and help develop better practices for their use, just as we did the good old RDBMS? What does Big Data mean to you? Which V gives your business the most pain, or the most value? Do you see these new tools as a useful addition to the BI toolbox, or are they just enabling a dangerous trend to find ghosts in the noise?

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• Decompilers - Myth or Fact ?

  - by Simon

  Lately I have been thinking of application security and binaries and decompilers. (FYI- Decompilers is just an anti-complier, the purpose is to get the source back from the binary) Is there such thing as "Perfect Decompiler"? or are binaries safe from reverse engineering? (For clarity sake, by "Perfect" I mean the original source files with all the variable names/macros/functions/classes/if possible comments in the respective headers and source files used to get the binary) What are some of the best practices used to prevent reverse engineering of software? Is it a major concern? Also is obfuscation/file permissions the only way to prevent unauthorized hacks on scripts? (call me a script-junky if you should)

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• Subterranean IL: Filter exception handlers

  - by Simon Cooper

  Filter handlers are the second type of exception handler that aren't accessible from C#. Unlike the other handler types, which have defined conditions for when the handlers execute, filter lets you use custom logic to determine whether the handler should be run. However, similar to a catch block, the filter block does not get run if control flow exits the block without throwing an exception. Introducing filter blocks An example of a filter block in IL is the following: .try { // try block } filter { // filter block endfilter }{ // filter handler } or, in v1 syntax, TryStart: // try block TryEnd: FilterStart: // filter block HandlerStart: // filter handler HandlerEnd: .try TryStart to TryEnd filter FilterStart handler HandlerStart to HandlerEnd In the v1 syntax there is no end label specified for the filter block. This is because the filter block must come immediately before the filter handler; the end of the filter block is the start of the filter handler. The filter block indicates to the CLR whether the filter handler should be executed using a boolean value on the stack when the endfilter instruction is run; true/non-zero if it is to be executed, false/zero if it isn't. At the start of the filter block, and the corresponding filter handler, a reference to the exception thrown is pushed onto the stack as a raw object (you have to manually cast to System.Exception). The allowed IL inside a filter block is tightly controlled; you aren't allowed branches outside the block, rethrow instructions, and other exception handling clauses. You can, however, use call and callvirt instructions to call other methods. Filter block logic To demonstrate filter block logic, in this example I'm filtering on whether there's a particular key in the Data dictionary of the thrown exception: .try { // try block } filter { // Filter starts with exception object on stack // C# code: ((Exception)e).Data.Contains("MyExceptionDataKey") // only execute handler if Contains returns true castclass [mscorlib]System.Exception callvirt instance class [mscorlib]System.Collections.IDictionary [mscorlib]System.Exception::get_Data() ldstr "MyExceptionDataKey" callvirt instance bool [mscorlib]System.Collections.IDictionary::Contains(object) endfilter }{ // filter handler // Also starts off with exception object on stack callvirt instance string [mscorlib]System.Object::ToString() call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) } Conclusion Filter exception handlers are another exception handler type that isn't accessible from C#, however, just like fault handlers, the behaviour can be replicated using a normal catch block: try { // try block } catch (Exception e) { if (!FilterLogic(e)) throw; // handler logic } So, it's not that great a loss, but it's still annoying that this functionality isn't directly accessible. Well, every feature starts off with minus 100 points, so it's understandable why something like this didn't make it into the C# compiler ahead of a different feature.

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• Animations in FBX exported from Maya are anchored in the wrong place

  - by Simon P Stevens

  We are trying to export a model and animation from Maya into Unity3d. In Maya, the model is anchored (pivot point) at the feet (and the body moves up and down). However after we have performed the FBX export, and imported the file into Unity the model is now appears to be anchored by the waist/head and the feet move. These example videos probably help explain the problem more clearly: Example video - Maya - Correct Example video - Unity - Wrong We have also noticed that if we take the FBX file and import it back into Maya we have exactly the same problem. It seems to be that the constraints no longer work after the FBX is reimported back to Maya, which just kills the connection between the joints and the control objects. When we exported the FBX we have tried checking the 'bake animations' check box. The fact that the same problem exist when importing the FBX back into both Maya and Unity suggests that the source of the problem is most likely with the Maya FBX export. Has anyone encountered this problem before and have any ideas how to fix it?

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• C# via Java: Introduction

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, I’ve recently changed jobs. Rather than working in .NET land, I’ve migrated over to Java land. But never fear! I’ll continue to peer under the covers of .NET, but my next series will use my new experience in Java to explore the design decisions made in the development of the C# programming language. After all, the design of C# was based on Java 1.2, and both languages have continued to evolve since then, incorporating modern software engineering concepts and requirements. Exploring the differences and similarities between the two will (hopefully) give us a deeper understanding into why .NET is implemented the way it is, the trade-offs involved, and what choices were made when new features were designed and added to the language and framework. Among others, I’ll be looking at differences in: Primitives Operators Generics Exceptions Accessibility Collections Delegates and inner classes Concurrency In my next post, I’ll start off by looking at the type primitives available in each language, and how Java and C# actually incorporate two different concepts of primitive types in their fundamental language design and use. I’m also thinking of looking at the inner details of Java and the JVM in my blogs, as well as C# and the CLR. If you’ve got any comments or thoughts on this, please let me know.

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• What micro web-framework has the lowest overhead but includes templating

  - by Simon Martin

  I want to rewrite a simple small (10 page) website and besides a contact form it could be written in pure html. It is currently built with classic asp and Dreamweaver templates. The reason I'm not simply writing 10 html pages is that I want to keep the layout all in 1 place so would need either includes or a masterpage. I don't want to use Dreamweaver templates, or batch processing (like org-mode) because I want to be able to edit using notepad (or Visual Studio) because occasionally I might need to edit a file on the server (Go Daddy's IIS admin interface will let me edit text). I don't want to use ASP.NET MVC or WebForms (which I use in my day job) because I don't need all the overhead they bring with them when essentially I'm serving up 9 static files, 1 contact form and 1 list of clubs (that I aim to use jQuery to filter). The shared hosting package I have on Go Daddy seems to take a long time to spin up when serving aspx files. Currently the clubs page is driven from an MS SQL database that I try to keep up to date by manually checking the dojo locator on the main HQ pages and editing the entries myself, this is again way over the top. I aim to get a text file with the club details (probably in JSON or xml format) and use that as the source for the clubs page. There will need to be a bit of programming for this as the HQ site is unable to provide an extract / feed so something will have to scrape the site periodically to update my clubs persistence file. I'd like that to be automated - but I'm happy to have that triggered on a visit to the clubs page so I don't need to worry about scheduling a job. I would probably have a separate process that updates the persistence that has nothing to do with the rest of the site. Ideally I'd like to use Mercurial (or git) to publish, I know Bitbucket (and github) both serve static page sites so they wouldn't work in this scenario (dynamic pages and a contact form) but that's the model I'd like to use if there is such a thing. My requirements are: Simple templating system, 1 place to define header, footers, menu etc., that can be edited using just notepad. Very minimal / lightweight framework. I don't need a monster for 10 pages Must run either on IIS7 (shared Go Daddy Windows hosting) or other free host

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• Inside Red Gate - Ricky Leeks

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, one of our profilers has a problem. Red Gate produces two .NET profilers - ANTS Performance Profiler (APP) and ANTS Memory Profiler (AMP). Both products help .NET developers solve problems they are virtually guaranteed to encounter at some point in their careers - slow code, and high memory usage, respectively. Everyone understands slow code - the symptoms are very obvious (an operation takes 2 hours when it should take 10 seconds), you know when you've solved it (the same operation now takes 15 seconds), and everyone understands how you can use a profiler like APP to help solve your particular problem. High memory usage is a much more subtle and misunderstood concept. How can .NET have memory leaks? The garbage collector, and how the CLR uses and frees memory, is one of the most misunderstood concepts in .NET. There's hundreds of blog posts out there covering various aspects of the GC and .NET memory, some of them helpful, some of them confusing, and some of them are just plain wrong. There's a lot of misconceptions out there. And, if you have got an application that uses far too much memory, it can be hard to wade through all the contradictory information available to even get an idea as to what's going on, let alone trying to solve it. That's where a memory profiler, like AMP, comes into play. Unfortunately, that's not the end of the issue. .NET memory management is a large, complicated, and misunderstood problem. Even armed with a profiler, you need to understand what .NET is doing with your objects, how it processes them, and how it frees them, to be able to use the profiler effectively to solve your particular problem. And that's what's wrong with AMP - even with all the thought, designs, UX sessions, and research we've put into AMP itself, some users simply don't have the knowledge required to be able to understand what AMP is telling them about how their application uses memory, and so they have problems understanding & solving their memory problem. Ricky Leeks This is where Ricky Leeks comes in. Created by one of the many...colourful...people in Red Gate, he headlines and promotes several tutorials, pages, and articles all with information on how .NET memory management actually works, with the goal to help educate developers on .NET memory management. And educating us all on how far you can push various vegetable-based puns. This, in turn, not only helps them understand and solve any memory issues they may be having, but helps them proactively code against such memory issues in their existing code. Ricky's latest outing is an interview on .NET Rocks, providing information on the Top 5 .NET Memory Management Gotchas, along with information on a free ebook on .NET Memory Management. Don't worry, there's loads more vegetable-based jokes where those came from...

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• Oracle IRM video demonstration of seperating duties of document security

  - by Simon Thorpe

  One thing an Information Rights Management technology should do well is separate out three main areas of responsibility.The business process of defining and controlling the classifications to which content is secured and the definition of the roles employees, customers, partners and contractors have when accessing secured content. Allow IT to manage the server and perform the role of authorizing the creation of new classifications to meet business needs but yet once the classification has been created and handed off to the business, IT no longer plays a role on the ongoing management. Empower the business to take ownership of classifications to which their own content is secured. For example an employee who is leading an acquisition project should be responsible for defining who has access to confidential project documents. This person should be able to manage the rights users have in the classification and also be the point of contact for those wishing to gain rights. Oracle IRM has since it's creation in the late 1990's had this core model at the heart of its design. Due in part to the important seperation of rights from the documents themselves, Oracle IRM places the right functionality within the right parts of the business. For example some IRM technologies allow the end user to make decisions about what users can print, edit or save a secured document. This in practice results in a wide variety of content secured with a plethora of options that don't conform to any policy. With Oracle IRM users choose from a list of classifications to which they have been given the ability to secure information against. Their role in the classification was given to them by the business owner of the classification, yet the definition of the role resides within the realm of corporate security who own the overall business classification policies. It is this type of design and philosophy in Oracle IRM that makes it an enterprise solution that works beyond a few users and a few secured documents to hundreds of thousands of users and millions of documents. This following video shows how Oracle IRM 11g, the market leading document security solution, lets the security organization manage and create classifications whilst the business owns and manages them. If you want to experience using Oracle IRM secured content and the effects of different roles users have, why not sign up for our free demonstration.

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• .NET Security Part 2

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, how do you create partial-trust appdomains? Where do you come across them? There are two main situations in which your assembly runs as partially-trusted using the Microsoft .NET stack: Creating a CLR assembly in SQL Server with anything other than the UNSAFE permission set. The permissions available in each permission set are given here. Loading an assembly in ASP.NET in any trust level other than Full. Information on ASP.NET trust levels can be found here. You can configure the specific permissions available to assemblies using ASP.NET policy files. Alternatively, you can create your own partially-trusted appdomain in code and directly control the permissions and the full-trust API available to the assemblies you load into the appdomain. This is the scenario I’ll be concentrating on in this post. Creating a partially-trusted appdomain There is a single overload of AppDomain.CreateDomain that allows you to specify the permissions granted to assemblies in that appdomain – this one. This is the only call that allows you to specify a PermissionSet for the domain. All the other calls simply use the permissions of the calling code. If the permissions are restricted, then the resulting appdomain is referred to as a sandboxed domain. There are three things you need to create a sandboxed domain: The specific permissions granted to all assemblies in the domain. The application base (aka working directory) of the domain. The list of assemblies that have full-trust if they are loaded into the sandboxed domain. The third item is what allows us to have a fully-trusted API that is callable by partially-trusted code. I’ll be looking at the details of this in a later post. Granting permissions to the appdomain Firstly, the permissions granted to the appdomain. This is encapsulated in a PermissionSet object, initialized either with no permissions or full-trust permissions. For sandboxed appdomains, the PermissionSet is initialized with no permissions, then you add permissions you want assemblies loaded into that appdomain to have by default: PermissionSet restrictedPerms = new PermissionSet(PermissionState.None); // all assemblies need Execution permission to run at all restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new SecurityPermission(SecurityPermissionFlag.Execution)); // grant general read access to C:\config.xml restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, @"C:\config.xml")); // grant permission to perform DNS lookups restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new DnsPermission(PermissionState.Unrestricted)); It’s important to point out that the permissions granted to an appdomain, and so to all assemblies loaded into that appdomain, are usable without needing to go through any SafeCritical code (see my last post if you’re unsure what SafeCritical code is). That is, partially-trusted code loaded into an appdomain with the above permissions (and so running under the Transparent security level) is able to create and manipulate a FileStream object to read from C:\config.xml directly. It is only for operations requiring permissions that are not granted to the appdomain that partially-trusted code is required to call a SafeCritical method that then asserts the missing permissions and performs the operation safely on behalf of the partially-trusted code. The application base of the domain This is simply set as a property on an AppDomainSetup object, and is used as the default directory assemblies are loaded from: AppDomainSetup appDomainSetup = new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = @"C:\temp\sandbox", }; If you’ve read the documentation around sandboxed appdomains, you’ll notice that it mentions a security hole if this parameter is set correctly. I’ll be looking at this, and other pitfalls, that will break the sandbox when using sandboxed appdomains, in a later post. Full-trust assemblies in the appdomain Finally, we need the strong names of the assemblies that, when loaded into the appdomain, will be run as full-trust, irregardless of the permissions specified on the appdomain. These assemblies will contain methods and classes decorated with SafeCritical and Critical attributes. I’ll be covering the details of creating full-trust APIs for partial-trust appdomains in a later post. This is how you get the strongnames of an assembly to be executed as full-trust in the sandbox: // get the Assembly object for the assembly Assembly assemblyWithApi = ... // get the StrongName from the assembly's collection of evidence StrongName apiStrongName = assemblyWithApi.Evidence.GetHostEvidence<StrongName>(); Creating the sandboxed appdomain So, putting these three together, you create the appdomain like so: AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain( "Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms, apiStrongName); You can then load and execute assemblies in this appdomain like any other. For example, to load an assembly into the appdomain and get an instance of the Sandboxed.Entrypoint class, implementing IEntrypoint, you do this: IEntrypoint o = (IEntrypoint)sandbox.CreateInstanceFromAndUnwrap( "C:\temp\sandbox\SandboxedAssembly.dll", "Sandboxed.Entrypoint"); // call method the Execute method on this object within the sandbox o.Execute(); The second parameter to CreateDomain is for security evidence used in the appdomain. This was a feature of the .NET 2 security model, and has been (mostly) obsoleted in the .NET 4 model. Unless the evidence is needed elsewhere (eg. isolated storage), you can pass in null for this parameter. Conclusion That’s the basics of sandboxed appdomains. The most important object is the PermissionSet that defines the permissions available to assemblies running in the appdomain; it is this object that defines the appdomain as full or partial-trust. The appdomain also needs a default directory used for assembly lookups as the ApplicationBase parameter, and you can specify an optional list of the strongnames of assemblies that will be given full-trust permissions if they are loaded into the sandboxed appdomain. Next time, I’ll be looking closer at full-trust assemblies running in a sandboxed appdomain, and what you need to do to make an API available to partial-trust code.

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• Linux Mint is Brilliant

  - by Simon Moon

  Most of my blog posts sound way too whiny. I'm not that guy. (Am I?) I've been using SUSE-flavored Linux for personal projects since 2002 (SUSE Linux 8.1). This past weekend, I made the heart-wrenching decision to abandon openSUSE (version 12.1) in favor of Linux Mint (version Maya). OpenSUSE had just become too burdensome. Packages that installed easily on RedHat or Debian always had issues running on top of OpenSUSE. And I never could get the Heroku Toolbelt installed in any kind of usable state.And so, ...I'm beginning again with this enticing young thing -- Mint with the Cinnamon window environment. Delicious. And while I'll always have fond memories of my years with openSUSE, I've got to admit that Mint makes running Linux feel good again. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031

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• Renault under threat from industrial espionage, intellectual property the target

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Last year we saw news of both General Motors and Ford losing a significant amount of valuable information to competitors overseas. Within weeks of the turn of 2011 we see the European car manufacturer, Renault, also suffering. In a recent news report, French Industry Minister Eric Besson warned the country was facing "economic war" and referenced a serious case of espionage which concerns information pertaining to the development of electric cars. Renault senior vice president Christian Husson told the AFP news agency that the people concerned were in a "particularly strategic position" in the company. An investigation had uncovered a "body of evidence which shows that the actions of these three colleagues were contrary to the ethics of Renault and knowingly and deliberately placed at risk the company's assets", Mr Husson said. A source told Reuters on Wednesday the company is worried its flagship electric vehicle program, in which Renault with its partner Nissan is investing 4 billion euros ($5.3 billion), might be threatened. This casts a shadow over the estimated losses of Ford ($50 million) and General Motors ($40 million). One executive in the corporate intelligence-gathering industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "It's really difficult to say it's a case of corporate espionage ... It can be carelessness." He cited a hypothetical example of an enthusiastic employee giving away too much information about his job on an online forum. While information has always been passed and leaked, inadvertently or on purpose, the rise of the Internet and social media means corporate spies or careless employees are now more likely to be found out, he added. We are seeing more and more examples of where companies like these need to invest in technologies such as Oracle IRM to ensure such important information can be kept under control. It isn't just the recent release of information into the public domain via the Wikileaks website that is of concern, but also the increasing threats of industrial espionage in cases such as these. Information rights management doesn't totally remove the threat, but abilities to control documents no matter where they exist certainly increases the capabilities significantly. Every single time someone opens a sealed document the IRM system audits the activity. This makes identifying a potential source for a leak much easier when you have an absolute record of every person who's had access to the documents. Oracle IRM can also help with accidental or careless loss. Often people use very sensitive information all the time and forget the importance of handling it correctly. With the ability to protect the information from screen shots and prevent people copy and pasting document information into social networks and other, unsecured documents, Oracle IRM brings a totally new level of information security that would have a significant impact on reducing the risk these organizations face of losing their most valuable information.

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• .NET Security Part 3

  - by Simon Cooper

  You write a security-related application that allows addins to be used. These addins (as dlls) can be downloaded from anywhere, and, if allowed to run full-trust, could open a security hole in your application. So you want to restrict what the addin dlls can do, using a sandboxed appdomain, as explained in my previous posts. But there needs to be an interaction between the code running in the sandbox and the code that created the sandbox, so the sandboxed code can control or react to things that happen in the controlling application. Sandboxed code needs to be able to call code outside the sandbox. Now, there are various methods of allowing cross-appdomain calls, the two main ones being .NET Remoting with MarshalByRefObject, and WCF named pipes. I’m not going to cover the details of setting up such mechanisms here, or which you should choose for your specific situation; there are plenty of blogs and tutorials covering such issues elsewhere. What I’m going to concentrate on here is the more general problem of running fully-trusted code within a sandbox, which is required in most methods of app-domain communication and control. Defining assemblies as fully-trusted In my last post, I mentioned that when you create a sandboxed appdomain, you can pass in a list of assembly strongnames that run as full-trust within the appdomain: // get the Assembly object for the assembly Assembly assemblyWithApi = ... // get the StrongName from the assembly's collection of evidence StrongName apiStrongName = assemblyWithApi.Evidence.GetHostEvidence<StrongName>(); // create the sandbox AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain( "Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms, apiStrongName); Any assembly that is loaded into the sandbox with a strong name the same as one in the list of full-trust strong names is unconditionally given full-trust permissions within the sandbox, irregardless of permissions and sandbox setup. This is very powerful! You should only use this for assemblies that you trust as much as the code creating the sandbox. So now you have a class that you want the sandboxed code to call: // within assemblyWithApi public class MyApi { public static void MethodToDoThings() { ... } } // within the sandboxed dll public class UntrustedSandboxedClass { public void DodgyMethod() { ... MyApi.MethodToDoThings(); ... } } However, if you try to do this, you get quite an ugly exception: MethodAccessException: Attempt by security transparent method ‘UntrustedSandboxedClass.DodgyMethod()’ to access security critical method ‘MyApi.MethodToDoThings()’ failed. Security transparency, which I covered in my first post in the series, has entered the picture. Partially-trusted code runs at the Transparent security level, fully-trusted code runs at the Critical security level, and Transparent code cannot under any circumstances call Critical code. Security transparency and AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute So the solution is easy, right? Make MethodToDoThings SafeCritical, then the transparent code running in the sandbox can call the api: [SecuritySafeCritical] public static void MethodToDoThings() { ... } However, this doesn’t solve the problem. When you try again, exactly the same exception is thrown; MethodToDoThings is still running as Critical code. What’s going on? By default, a fully-trusted assembly always runs Critical code, irregardless of any security attributes on its types and methods. This is because it may not have been designed in a secure way when called from transparent code – as we’ll see in the next post, it is easy to open a security hole despite all the security protections .NET 4 offers. When exposing an assembly to be called from partially-trusted code, the entire assembly needs a security audit to decide what should be transparent, safe critical, or critical, and close any potential security holes. This is where AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute (APTCA) comes in. Without this attribute, fully-trusted assemblies run Critical code, and partially-trusted assemblies run Transparent code. When this attribute is applied to an assembly, it confirms that the assembly has had a full security audit, and it is safe to be called from untrusted code. All code in that assembly runs as Transparent, but SecurityCriticalAttribute and SecuritySafeCriticalAttribute can be applied to individual types and methods to make those run at the Critical or SafeCritical levels, with all the restrictions that entails. So, to allow the sandboxed assembly to call the full-trust API assembly, simply add APCTA to the API assembly: [assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers] and everything works as you expect. The sandboxed dll can call your API dll, and from there communicate with the rest of the application. Conclusion That’s the basics of running a full-trust assembly in a sandboxed appdomain, and allowing a sandboxed assembly to access it. The key is AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute, which is what lets partially-trusted code call a fully-trusted assembly. However, an assembly with APTCA applied to it means that you have run a full security audit of every type and member in the assembly. If you don’t, then you could inadvertently open a security hole. I’ll be looking at ways this can happen in my next post.

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• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - PE Headers

  - by Simon Cooper

  Today, I'll be starting a look at what exactly is inside a .NET assembly - how the metadata and IL is stored, how Windows knows how to load it, and what all those bytes are actually doing. First of all, we need to understand the PE file format. PE files .NET assemblies are built on top of the PE (Portable Executable) file format that is used for all Windows executables and dlls, which itself is built on top of the MSDOS executable file format. The reason for this is that when .NET 1 was released, it wasn't a built-in part of the operating system like it is nowadays. Prior to Windows XP, .NET executables had to load like any other executable, had to execute native code to start the CLR to read & execute the rest of the file. However, starting with Windows XP, the operating system loader knows natively how to deal with .NET assemblies, rendering most of this legacy code & structure unnecessary. It still is part of the spec, and so is part of every .NET assembly. The result of this is that there are a lot of structure values in the assembly that simply aren't meaningful in a .NET assembly, as they refer to features that aren't needed. These are either set to zero or to certain pre-defined values, specified in the CLR spec. There are also several fields that specify the size of other datastructures in the file, which I will generally be glossing over in this initial post. Structure of a PE file Most of a PE file is split up into separate sections; each section stores different types of data. For instance, the .text section stores all the executable code; .rsrc stores unmanaged resources, .debug contains debugging information, and so on. Each section has a section header associated with it; this specifies whether the section is executable, read-only or read/write, whether it can be cached... When an exe or dll is loaded, each section can be mapped into a different location in memory as the OS loader sees fit. In order to reliably address a particular location within a file, most file offsets are specified using a Relative Virtual Address (RVA). This specifies the offset from the start of each section, rather than the offset within the executable file on disk, so the various sections can be moved around in memory without breaking anything. The mapping from RVA to file offset is done using the section headers, which specify the range of RVAs which are valid within that section. For example, if the .rsrc section header specifies that the base RVA is 0x4000, and the section starts at file offset 0xa00, then an RVA of 0x401d (offset 0x1d within the .rsrc section) corresponds to a file offset of 0xa1d. Because each section has its own base RVA, each valid RVA has a one-to-one mapping with a particular file offset. PE headers As I said above, most of the header information isn't relevant to .NET assemblies. To help show what's going on, I've created a diagram identifying all the various parts of the first 512 bytes of a .NET executable assembly. I've highlighted the relevant bytes that I will refer to in this post: Bear in mind that all numbers are stored in the assembly in little-endian format; the hex number 0x0123 will appear as 23 01 in the diagram. The first 64 bytes of every file is the DOS header. This starts with the magic number 'MZ' (0x4D, 0x5A in hex), identifying this file as an executable file of some sort (an .exe or .dll). Most of the rest of this header is zeroed out. The important part of this header is at offset 0x3C - this contains the file offset of the PE signature (0x80). Between the DOS header & PE signature is the DOS stub - this is a stub program that simply prints out 'This program cannot be run in DOS mode.\r\n' to the console. I will be having a closer look at this stub later on. The PE signature starts at offset 0x80, with the magic number 'PE\0\0' (0x50, 0x45, 0x00, 0x00), identifying this file as a PE executable, followed by the PE file header (also known as the COFF header). The relevant field in this header is in the last two bytes, and it specifies whether the file is an executable or a dll; bit 0x2000 is set for a dll. Next up is the PE standard fields, which start with a magic number of 0x010b for x86 and AnyCPU assemblies, and 0x20b for x64 assemblies. Most of the rest of the fields are to do with the CLR loader stub, which I will be covering in a later post. After the PE standard fields comes the NT-specific fields; again, most of these are not relevant for .NET assemblies. The one that is is the highlighted Subsystem field, and specifies if this is a GUI or console app - 0x20 for a GUI app, 0x30 for a console app. Data directories & section headers After the PE and COFF headers come the data directories; each directory specifies the RVA (first 4 bytes) and size (next 4 bytes) of various important parts of the executable. The only relevant ones are the 2nd (Import table), 13th (Import Address table), and 15th (CLI header). The Import and Import Address table are only used by the startup stub, so we will look at those later on. The 15th points to the CLI header, where the CLR-specific metadata begins. After the data directories comes the section headers; one for each section in the file. Each header starts with the section's ASCII name, null-padded to 8 bytes. Again, most of each header is irrelevant, but I've highlighted the base RVA and file offset in each header. In the diagram, you can see the following sections: .text: base RVA 0x2000, file offset 0x200 .rsrc: base RVA 0x4000, file offset 0xa00 .reloc: base RVA 0x6000, file offset 0x1000 The .text section contains all the CLR metadata and code, and so is by far the largest in .NET assemblies. The .rsrc section contains the data you see in the Details page in the right-click file properties page, but is otherwise unused. The .reloc section contains address relocations, which we will look at when we study the CLR startup stub. What about the CLR? As you can see, most of the first 512 bytes of an assembly are largely irrelevant to the CLR, and only a few bytes specify needed things like the bitness (AnyCPU/x86 or x64), whether this is an exe or dll, and the type of app this is. There are some bytes that I haven't covered that affect the layout of the file (eg. the file alignment, which determines where in a file each section can start). These values are pretty much constant in most .NET assemblies, and don't affect the CLR data directly. Conclusion To summarize, the important data in the first 512 bytes of a file is: DOS header. This contains a pointer to the PE signature. DOS stub, which we'll be looking at in a later post. PE signature PE file header (aka COFF header). This specifies whether the file is an exe or a dll. PE standard fields. This specifies whether the file is AnyCPU/32bit or 64bit. PE NT-specific fields. This specifies what type of app this is, if it is an app. Data directories. The 15th entry (at offset 0x168) contains the RVA and size of the CLI header inside the .text section. Section headers. These are used to map between RVA and file offset. The important one is .text, which is where all the CLR data is stored. In my next post, we'll start looking at the metadata used by the CLR directly, which is all inside the .text section.

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• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentDictionary

  - by Simon Cooper

  Using locks to implement a thread-safe collection is rather like using a sledgehammer - unsubtle, easy to understand, and tends to make any other tool redundant. Unlike the previous two collections I looked at, ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue, ConcurrentDictionary uses locks quite heavily. However, it is careful to wield locks only where necessary to ensure that concurrency is maximised. This will, by necessity, be a higher-level look than my other posts in this series, as there is quite a lot of code and logic in ConcurrentDictionary. Therefore, I do recommend that you have ConcurrentDictionary open in a decompiler to have a look at all the details that I skip over. The problem with locks There's several things to bear in mind when using locks, as encapsulated by the lock keyword in C# and the System.Threading.Monitor class in .NET (if you're unsure as to what lock does in C#, I briefly covered it in my first post in the series): Locks block threads The most obvious problem is that threads waiting on a lock can't do any work at all. No preparatory work, no 'optimistic' work like in ConcurrentQueue and ConcurrentStack, nothing. It sits there, waiting to be unblocked. This is bad if you're trying to maximise concurrency. Locks are slow Whereas most of the methods on the Interlocked class can be compiled down to a single CPU instruction, ensuring atomicity at the hardware level, taking out a lock requires some heavy lifting by the CLR and the operating system. There's quite a bit of work required to take out a lock, block other threads, and wake them up again. If locks are used heavily, this impacts performance. Deadlocks When using locks there's always the possibility of a deadlock - two threads, each holding a lock, each trying to aquire the other's lock. Fortunately, this can be avoided with careful programming and structured lock-taking, as we'll see. So, it's important to minimise where locks are used to maximise the concurrency and performance of the collection. Implementation As you might expect, ConcurrentDictionary is similar in basic implementation to the non-concurrent Dictionary, which I studied in a previous post. I'll be using some concepts introduced there, so I recommend you have a quick read of it. So, if you were implementing a thread-safe dictionary, what would you do? The naive implementation is to simply have a single lock around all methods accessing the dictionary. This would work, but doesn't allow much concurrency. Fortunately, the bucketing used by Dictionary allows a simple but effective improvement to this - one lock per bucket. This allows different threads modifying different buckets to do so in parallel. Any thread making changes to the contents of a bucket takes the lock for that bucket, ensuring those changes are thread-safe. The method that maps each bucket to a lock is the GetBucketAndLockNo method: private void GetBucketAndLockNo( int hashcode, out int bucketNo, out int lockNo, int bucketCount) { // the bucket number is the hashcode (without the initial sign bit) // modulo the number of buckets bucketNo = (hashcode & 0x7fffffff) % bucketCount; // and the lock number is the bucket number modulo the number of locks lockNo = bucketNo % m_locks.Length; } However, this does require some changes to how the buckets are implemented. The 'implicit' linked list within a single backing array used by the non-concurrent Dictionary adds a dependency between separate buckets, as every bucket uses the same backing array. Instead, ConcurrentDictionary uses a strict linked list on each bucket: This ensures that each bucket is entirely separate from all other buckets; adding or removing an item from a bucket is independent to any changes to other buckets. Modifying the dictionary All the operations on the dictionary follow the same basic pattern: void AlterBucket(TKey key, ...) { int bucketNo, lockNo; 1: GetBucketAndLockNo( key.GetHashCode(), out bucketNo, out lockNo, m_buckets.Length); 2: lock (m_locks[lockNo]) { 3: Node headNode = m_buckets[bucketNo]; 4: Mutate the node linked list as appropriate } } For example, when adding another entry to the dictionary, you would iterate through the linked list to check whether the key exists already, and add the new entry as the head node. When removing items, you would find the entry to remove (if it exists), and remove the node from the linked list. Adding, updating, and removing items all follow this pattern. Performance issues There is a problem we have to address at this point. If the number of buckets in the dictionary is fixed in the constructor, then the performance will degrade from O(1) to O(n) when a large number of items are added to the dictionary. As more and more items get added to the linked lists in each bucket, the lookup operations will spend most of their time traversing a linear linked list. To fix this, the buckets array has to be resized once the number of items in each bucket has gone over a certain limit. (In ConcurrentDictionary this limit is when the size of the largest bucket is greater than the number of buckets for each lock. This check is done at the end of the TryAddInternal method.) Resizing the bucket array and re-hashing everything affects every bucket in the collection. Therefore, this operation needs to take out every lock in the collection. Taking out mutiple locks at once inevitably summons the spectre of the deadlock; two threads each hold a lock, and each trying to acquire the other lock. How can we eliminate this? Simple - ensure that threads never try to 'swap' locks in this fashion. When taking out multiple locks, always take them out in the same order, and always take out all the locks you need before starting to release them. In ConcurrentDictionary, this is controlled by the AcquireLocks, AcquireAllLocks and ReleaseLocks methods. Locks are always taken out and released in the order they are in the m_locks array, and locks are all released right at the end of the method in a finally block. At this point, it's worth pointing out that the locks array is never re-assigned, even when the buckets array is increased in size. The number of locks is fixed in the constructor by the concurrencyLevel parameter. This simplifies programming the locks; you don't have to check if the locks array has changed or been re-assigned before taking out a lock object. And you can be sure that when a thread takes out a lock, another thread isn't going to re-assign the lock array. This would create a new series of lock objects, thus allowing another thread to ignore the existing locks (and any threads controlling them), breaking thread-safety. Consequences of growing the array Just because we're using locks doesn't mean that race conditions aren't a problem. We can see this by looking at the GrowTable method. The operation of this method can be boiled down to: private void GrowTable(Node[] buckets) { try { 1: Acquire first lock in the locks array // this causes any other thread trying to take out // all the locks to block because the first lock in the array // is always the one taken out first // check if another thread has already resized the buckets array // while we were waiting to acquire the first lock 2: if (buckets != m_buckets) return; 3: Calculate the new size of the backing array 4: Node[] array = new array[size]; 5: Acquire all the remaining locks 6: Re-hash the contents of the existing buckets into array 7: m_buckets = array; } finally { 8: Release all locks } } As you can see, there's already a check for a race condition at step 2, for the case when the GrowTable method is called twice in quick succession on two separate threads. One will successfully resize the buckets array (blocking the second in the meantime), when the second thread is unblocked it'll see that the array has already been resized & exit without doing anything. There is another case we need to consider; looking back at the AlterBucket method above, consider the following situation: Thread 1 calls AlterBucket; step 1 is executed to get the bucket and lock numbers. Thread 2 calls GrowTable and executes steps 1-5; thread 1 is blocked when it tries to take out the lock in step 2. Thread 2 re-hashes everything, re-assigns the buckets array, and releases all the locks (steps 6-8). Thread 1 is unblocked and continues executing, but the calculated bucket and lock numbers are no longer valid. Between calculating the correct bucket and lock number and taking out the lock, another thread has changed where everything is. Not exactly thread-safe. Well, a similar problem was solved in ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue by storing a local copy of the state, doing the necessary calculations, then checking if that state is still valid. We can use a similar idea here: void AlterBucket(TKey key, ...) { while (true) { Node[] buckets = m_buckets; int bucketNo, lockNo; GetBucketAndLockNo( key.GetHashCode(), out bucketNo, out lockNo, buckets.Length); lock (m_locks[lockNo]) { // if the state has changed, go back to the start if (buckets != m_buckets) continue; Node headNode = m_buckets[bucketNo]; Mutate the node linked list as appropriate } break; } } TryGetValue and GetEnumerator And so, finally, we get onto TryGetValue and GetEnumerator. I've left these to the end because, well, they don't actually use any locks. How can this be? Whenever you change a bucket, you need to take out the corresponding lock, yes? Indeed you do. However, it is important to note that TryGetValue and GetEnumerator don't actually change anything. Just as immutable objects are, by definition, thread-safe, read-only operations don't need to take out a lock because they don't change anything. All lockless methods can happily iterate through the buckets and linked lists without worrying about locking anything. However, this does put restrictions on how the other methods operate. Because there could be another thread in the middle of reading the dictionary at any time (even if a lock is taken out), the dictionary has to be in a valid state at all times. Every change to state has to be made visible to other threads in a single atomic operation (all relevant variables are marked volatile to help with this). This restriction ensures that whatever the reading threads are doing, they never read the dictionary in an invalid state (eg items that should be in the collection temporarily removed from the linked list, or reading a node that has had it's key & value removed before the node itself has been removed from the linked list). Fortunately, all the operations needed to change the dictionary can be done in that way. Bucket resizes are made visible when the new array is assigned back to the m_buckets variable. Any additions or modifications to a node are done by creating a new node, then splicing it into the existing list using a single variable assignment. Node removals are simply done by re-assigning the node's m_next pointer. Because the dictionary can be changed by another thread during execution of the lockless methods, the GetEnumerator method is liable to return dirty reads - changes made to the dictionary after GetEnumerator was called, but before the enumeration got to that point in the dictionary. It's worth listing at this point which methods are lockless, and which take out all the locks in the dictionary to ensure they get a consistent view of the dictionary: Lockless: TryGetValue GetEnumerator The indexer getter ContainsKey Takes out every lock (lockfull?): Count IsEmpty Keys Values CopyTo ToArray Concurrent principles That covers the overall implementation of ConcurrentDictionary. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of this sophisticated collection. That I leave to you. However, we've looked at enough to be able to extract some useful principles for concurrent programming: Partitioning When using locks, the work is partitioned into independant chunks, each with its own lock. Each partition can then be modified concurrently to other partitions. Ordered lock-taking When a method does need to control the entire collection, locks are taken and released in a fixed order to prevent deadlocks. Lockless reads Read operations that don't care about dirty reads don't take out any lock; the rest of the collection is implemented so that any reading thread always has a consistent view of the collection. That leads us to the final collection in this little series - ConcurrentBag. Lacking a non-concurrent analogy, it is quite different to any other collection in the class libraries. Prepare your thinking hats!

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• How do programmers deal with Project Lead/Managers?

  - by Simon

  Project Managers/Technical Leads sometimes tend to be over enthusiastic when it comes to software. But during code reviews if instead of functionality of the code the only complain one hears is about formatting/spacing and similar trivial things, when there are far better things to discuss (Among other things I have noticed the sometimes during the so called "reviews" suggestions are made that implementation needs a re-write just because it doesnt use the most happening technology/buzzword) How do fellow programmers deal with such scenarios? or is this just a one off? (or is the fault entirely on me )If you have similar experience and what you did to overcome it? Feel free to share.

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