How to Configure ASP.NET Core Data Protection

In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, thousands of employees have been working from home. This necessitates remote data protection even more than before. Whether employees work from a central server in the workplace or their smartphones at home, businesses need to ensure that data is protected wherever they are.

Data breaches and data loss incidents can damage customers’ trust and bring organizations to their knees. Data loss can cause financial losses, loss of brand value, and legal liability for most organizations since they must adhere to data privacy standards and regulations.

Digital transformation also presents several data security challenges for organizations of all sizes. This guide aims to provide you with an overview of what data protection entails, the ASP.NET core data protection process, and how you can configure it.

Table of Content

• Data Protection: Importance & Implications
• A Comparison Of Data Protection Security and Privacy
• ASP Data Management Process
• Delving Deep into Data Management
• .Net Core Data Protection with ASP
• How to Configure ASP.NET Core Data protection?
• Conclusion

Data Protection: Importance & Implications

Protecting data means preventing it from being hacked, tampered with, or wiped out.

Data protection is becoming increasingly important as data generation and storage continue to expand at a breakneck pace. Additionally, there is no room for downtime that could prevent access to crucial information in today’s world.

All these factors highlight the importance of having a reliable data protection strategy. A data protection strategy typically focuses on three key areas.

Data integrity - Integrity constraints can help organizations prevent accidental or intentional corruption of data.

Data availability - It’s a computer storage term referring to the fastest possible recovery of damaged or lost data.

Data accessibility - Protecting data from unauthorized access by ensuring that only those who need it can reach it.

A Comparison Of Data Protection Security and Privacy

Data security, data privacy, data protection, and cyber security may be used as synonyms by some businesses, but these terms refer to very different things.

Cyber security: The concept of cyber security covers all types of digital security, including the protection of digital records and networks.

Data security: As you just read, data security is one of the subcategories of cybersecurity. The essential element of data security is protecting data from malware and misuse. Consequently, the appropriate tools provide protection against internal and external threats.

Data protection: Data protection refers to the way data is stored and transferred using technology. Backup (making copies) and recovery are methods of data protection to protect against accidental loss.

Data privacy: The concept of data privacy is all about setting limits on how data can be accessed. It’s important for organizations to identify who has access to their data since a privacy breach often results in a data security compromise.

ASP Data Management Process

You're probably familiar with the idea that security credentials, secrets, and licenses should be rotated regularly. This can help minimize the damage that the compromisation of secrets might have on your enterprise.

This is also why HTTPS keys have been issued with progressively shorter lifespans.

But, how often can you really rotate these secrets in practice? Rotating secrets and credentials may indeed be difficult, depending on what framework and programs you use.

Due to the essential nature of encryption keys in ASP.NET Core applications, key rotation is one of its default settings for data protection. There is a 90-day standard lifespan for these credential keys, but you don’t have to concern yourself with such matters.

When the existing keys are about to lose their validity, the data-protection system spontaneously generates new ones, AKA key rings.

Delving Deep into Data Management

There are as many definitions of data security management as there are approaches to data security concerns. There must be a clear understanding and communication of the information security policies and services that your organization offers, as they may vary from one site to another.

Generally speaking, there are two main categories of data protection under data management.

Controlling data lifecycle: Automates data transfer to online and offline archives according to usage and privacy concerns. As big data grows in importance nowadays, this includes gathering useful information and enabling organizations to derive value from it.

Monitoring information assets: Helps avoid software and individual mistakes, malware or cyberattacks, system failures, and malfunctioning equipment by analyzing, categorizing, and safeguarding information assets.

.Net Core Data Protection with ASP

Asp.NET Core uses the data protection system to encrypt data that unauthorized individuals must handle. Most application frameworks and models, such as ASP.NET Core, configure the data protection system and add it to a service container that’s accessed using coding solutions.

This is demonstrated in authentication cookies, a well-known example. The purpose of cookies is to maintain data from one request to the next. You don't want to provide your username and password after every communication with the server, do you?

You only need to send your login information once to the server. Once your credentials are confirmed, the server stores a cookie that reads, “this user doesn’t need to provide any other information”.

While this is a great example, it’s common knowledge that data protection’s goal isn't just to prevent others from accessing your cookies. Data protection solutions also support data portability, recovery and deduplication, and storage limitation.

It's also extremely important for you as a website owner to prevent your users from editing their own cookies. In other words, the application has to know the information is true to trust the cookie.

Just imagine what would happen if your website sent cookie parameters in plain text, so users could easily modify them. That wouldn’t be a simple flaw in your website’s security but a disaster waiting to happen.

This is precisely where the ASP.NET Core data protection system comes into play. It protects sensitive and personal website data, such as authentication cookies, by locking and unlocking them.

As a result of encrypting the sensitive data before returning it, the application can trust that its contents have not been altered.

How to Configure ASP.NET Core Data protection?

ASP.NET Core runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Docker, and locally hosted servers, as well as a Raspberry Pi. It goes without saying that various platform-specific technologies and functionalities are offered on each of those platforms, and .NET Core needs to be secure across them all.

The data-protection system circumvents this problem by using a plugin-style design. The pluggable sections are divided into two categories:

Continuity of key ring location: Each keyring corresponds to a specific address. Here the question arises: where is the best place to keep the keys?

Continual encryption: Re-encrypting keys at rest is a technique that prevents malicious users (like hackers) from accessing unencrypted data stored on a disk. This begs the question: what is the best method to encrypt website keys at rest?

As amazing as .Net core’s default technologies function on their own, most of them aren't going to satisfy your needs once you start developing production applications and expanding them. Instead, you'll likely need to hire an ASP NET core development company to handle the rest of the process for you.

Conclusion

Encryption and decryption of authentication tokens are handled implicitly by the ASP.NET Core data protection system.

Companies can build highly scalable systems using the ASP.NET framework. In addition to being extensible, the framework does not require companies to migrate from it when handling high traffic levels.

With flexible hiring models, The One Technologies offers data security solutions to meet your project requirements. Our .NET specialists are highly competent and experienced in developing user-friendly apps that can make any prospect into a customer.

Contact us today to hire .NET developers if you are looking for professional and skilled .net developers.