Protecting sensitive entity data

Question

Hi, I'm looking for some advice on architecture for a client/server solution with some peculiarities.

The client is a fairly thick one, leaving the server mostly to peristence, concurrency and infrastructure concerns. The server contains a number of entities which contain both sensitive and public information. Think for example that the entities are persons, assume that social security number and name are sensitive and age is publicly viewable.

When starting the client, the user is presented with a number of entities, not disclosing any sensitive information. At any time the user can choose to log in and authenticate against the server, given the authentication is successful the user is granted access to the sensitive information.

The client is hosting a domain model and I was thinking of implementing this as some kind of "lazy loading", making the first request instantiating the entities and later refreshing them with sensitive data. The entity getters would throw exceptions on sensitive information when they've not been disclosed, f.e.:

class PersonImpl : PersonEntity
{
    private bool undisclosed;

    public override string SocialSecurityNumber {
        get {
            if (undisclosed)
                throw new UndisclosedDataException();

            return base.SocialSecurityNumber;
        }
    }
}

Another more friendly approach could be to have a value object indicating that the value is undisclosed.

get {
    if (undisclosed)
        return undisclosedValue;

    return base.SocialSecurityNumber;
}

Some concerns:

• What if the user logs in and then out, the sensitive data has been loaded but must be disclosed once again.
• One could argue that this type of functionality belongs within the domain and not some infrastructural implementation(i.e. repository implementations).
• As always when dealing with a larger number of properties there's a risk that this type of functionality clutters the code

Any insights or discussion is appreciated!

Answer 1

I think that this is actually a great example of using View Models. Your concern seems directly related to the consumption of the entities, because of the data that they contain. Instead of passing your entities all the way up to the UI, you could restrict them to live within the domain only - i.e. no entities are passed into or out of the domain at all, with most/all activities done with a command/query approach on the repositories. Repositories would then return a view model instead of the entity.

So how/why does this apply? You could actually have two different view models. One for authenticated and one for non-authenticated users. You expose the actual values for the sensitive data in the authenticated view model and not for the non-authenticated one. You could have them derived from a common interface, and then code against the interface instead of the object type. For your concrete implementation of the non-authenticated user, you can just populate the non-sensitive data, leaving the sensitive getters to do what you want them to do.

My opinion on a couple of points:

• I am not a fan of lazy loading in entities. Lazy loading is a data access responsibility and not really part of the model. For me, it is a first-class member of the things I vehemently avoid in my domain, along with paging and sorting. As for how to relate these items together, I would rather loosely couple the objects via ID pointers to other entities. If I want/need the data contained by one of these entities, then I can load it. It is kind of like lazy loading in a way, but I enforce that it never happens in the domain model itself by doing this.
• I am not a fan of throwing exceptions on getters. Setters, on the other hand, is fine. I look at it this way. The entity should always be in a valid state. Getters will not impact the state of the entity - setters will. Throwing on a setter is enforcing the integrity of the model. Using the two view model approach would allow me to move the logic to the presenter. So, I could basically do something like "if user is of type non-authorized, do this; otherwise do something else". Since what you are referring to would ultimately be a case of how the data is presented to the user, and not important to the model, I think it fits well. In general, I use nullable types for my properties that can be null and do not enforce anything on the getters, as it is not part of its responsibility, usually. Instead, I use roles to determine what view model to use.

The obvious drawback is that there is more coding required to use the view models, but it comes at the obvious benefit of decoupling presentation and views from the domain. It also will help in unit/integration testing, where you can verify that a certain view model cannot return a type of data.

However, you can use something akin to AutoMapper (depending on what your platform is) to help in populating your view model from your entities.

Answer 2

I made the mistake of posting the question without creating an OpenId so it looks like I'll have to comment here(?).

First of all, thanks for taking you time to answer - It certainly has more to do with how data is presented than how the model works. However, I feel the need to clarify a few things. The domain model / entities are never referenced directly from the UI. I'm using a variant of the DM-V-VM pattern for UI/business model separation. For lazy loading and repository implementation in general I have entity implementations in a infrastructure layer where things like serialization, dirty tracking and lazy loading is handled.

So the domain layer has entities like:

class Entity {
    virtual string SocialSecurityNumber { get; }
}

And the infrastructure layer adds some other functionality to be able to update and restore entites from a server:

class EntityImpl : Entity {
    bool isDirty;
    bool isLoaded;
    // Provide the means to set value on deserialization
    override string SocialSecurityNumber;
}

So the lazy loading behavior would be implemented in the infrastructure layer and never seen by the domain layer.

I agree that throwing on getters wouldn't be nice but my concerns are on how an anonymous view model would retrieve the data. As of now, to retrieve a list of entities the viewmodel would hold a reference to a domain repository, should I have two repositories, one for authenticated(and therefore disclosed) entities, and another one for the unauthenticated users - maybe even two different entities?