Security Architecture for SharePoint Products and Technologies

Share Point site provides services across an extranet or is accessible from the Internet by the general public, it is essential that external access to the site occurs through a firewall. The firewall inspects all incoming and outgoing traffic, and then allows or disallows the traffic based on the preconfigured policies.

Firewalls perform packet filtering: when traffic comes to the firewall, it compares the data in the IP header with the preconfigured rules to determine whether to allow or deny access. However, to protect SharePoint Portal Server deployments from external attacks, it is also necessary to check and verify the payload inside the HTTP header.

Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000 firewall is an application-layer firewall that, in addition to packet filtering, provides the ability to examine the content contained in the application-level protocols such as HTTP. Refer to Chapter 25, “Firewall Considerations for SharePoint Portal Server Deployments,” for detailed information on the ISA server configuration for making your SharePoint sites available to external users without compromising the security of your internal network.

In the Web environment, SSL is commonly used between Web browsers and front-end Web servers to create a secure communication channel. In SharePoint Products and Technologies deployments, SSL provides a secure way of establishing an encrypted communication link with users who connect to the SharePoint sites from outside the firewall.

In this chapter, we looked at the security mechanisms SharePoint Products and Technologies uses to provide secure access for users and reduce the threat of security compromise. User authentication is built on underlying technologies such as IIS and ASP.NET and uses Windows security principals, while access authorization is based on a site group membership that associates each user directly or indirectly with a permission that controls the specific actions that the user can perform. Code access security allows you to configure granular access for the SharePoint Products and Technologies application code.

Microsoft Share Point Communication security is important for making sure that the data is transmitted securely both inside and outside the firewall. because microsoft always want his client secure. Because Microsoft Share Point Products and Technologies security is layered on top of the security of many underlying technologies, it is important to implement a defense-in-depth approach that addresses security across all components of your SharePoint Products and Technologies deployment.