PrincipalPermissionAttribute Class

PrincipalPermissionAttribute can be used to declaratively demand that users running your code belong to a specified role or have been authenticated. Use of Unrestricted creates a PrincipalPermission with Authenticated set to true and Name and Role set to null.

The scope of the declaration that is allowed depends on the SecurityAction that is used. PrincipalPermissionAttribute cannot be applied at the assembly level.

The security information declared by a security attribute is stored in the metadata of the attribute target and is accessed by the system at run time. Security attributes are used only for declarative security. For imperative security, use the corresponding permission class.

Important

Before you use this class to demand principal permission, you must set the current application domain's principal policy to the enumeration value WindowsPrincipal. By default, the principal policy is set to UnauthenticatedPrincipal. If you do not set the principal policy to WindowsPrincipal, a demand for principal permission will fail. The following code should be executed before the principal permission is demanded: AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetPrincipalPolicy(PrincipalPolicy.WindowsPrincipal).

The following example demonstrates how the PrincipalPermissionAttribute class is used declaratively to demand that the current user be an administrator.

Note

In Windows Vista and later versions of the Windows operating system, User Account Control (UAC) determines the privileges of a user. If you are a member of the Built-in Administrators group, you are assigned two run-time access tokens: a standard user access token and an administrator access token. By default, you are in the standard user role. To execute the code that requires you to be an administrator, you must first elevate your privileges from standard user to administrator. You can do this when you start an application by right-clicking the application icon and indicating that you want to run as an administrator.

using System;
using System.Threading;
using System.Security.Permissions;
using System.Security.Principal;

class SecurityPrincipalDemo
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        try
        {
            // PrincipalPolicy must be set to WindowsPrincipal to check roles.
            AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetPrincipalPolicy(PrincipalPolicy.WindowsPrincipal);
            // Check using the PrincipalPermissionAttribute
            CheckAdministrator();
            // Check using PrincipalPermission class.
            PrincipalPermission principalPerm = new PrincipalPermission(null, "Administrators");
            principalPerm.Demand();
            Console.WriteLine("Demand succeeded.");
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
        }
    }
    [PrincipalPermission(SecurityAction.Demand, Role = "Administrators")]
    static void CheckAdministrator()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("User is an administrator");
    }
}

.NET Framework

.NET Framework Client Profile

Windows 7, Windows Vista SP1 or later, Windows XP SP3, Windows XP SP2 x64 Edition, Windows Server 2008 (Server Core not supported), Windows Server 2008 R2 (Server Core supported with SP1 or later), Windows Server 2003 SP2

Reference

Other Resources