- Where Does Silverlight Come From?
- Using Third-Party Plug-Ins
- Running on Multiple Platforms
- Making the Web Application Secure
- Introducing Silverlight.net
- What Do You Need to Run Silverlight?
- Updating Your Runtime-Automatically
- Trying Silverlight Demos
- What Do You Need to Develop Silverlight?
- Reading the Documentation
- Looking into Silverlight's Future
- Summary
Making the Web Application Secure
Security in web applications is a huge challenge. Even though Microsoft has more often than any other company been the target of virulent criticisms because some of their applications or operating systems were not secure enough, it’s fair to say that any popular web technology is exposed and has had security issues (Java, Firefox, the Linux operating system, the new Google Chrome web browser and many others have all been the target of attacks).
Microsoft is taking the security of Silverlight-based applications very seriously. Silverlight applications run in a “sandbox” that limits the functionality of the application and protects the computer it runs on against attacks. Every time a feature is allowed by the sandbox, it is carefully tested to make sure that the change doesn’t present a hole for a potential attack.
If humanity was intrinsically good, programming would be easier, but of course, security is not just a matter of attackers, it also has a lot to do with bad code, memory corruptions, and so on. Thankfully, the .NET programming platform (the so-called “managed code”) is a secure way of programming. Unlike older unmanaged C++ code, many bugs are eliminated already at the source by the much safer managed programming languages. Memory corruption is almost impossible; memory is automatically freed by the Garbage collector when it is not used anymore, making memory leaks much more infrequent.
Obviously it would be naive to believe that Silverlight will never be attacked, or that Silverlight applications will never crash. However, thanks to the experience gathered by the .NET teams, thanks to the managed programming languages, and thanks to the extra attention invested by Microsoft into that matter, Silverlight should provide a very safe environment.