Does reflection breaks the idea of private methods, because private methods can be access outside of the class?

Question

Does reflection break the idea of private methods? Because private methods can be accessed from outside of the class? (Maybe I don\'t understand the meaning of reflection or

Answer 1

It's like your house. Locks only keep out honest people, or people who aren't willing to pick your lock.

Data is data, if someone is determined enough, they can do anything with your code. Literally anything.

So yes, reflection will allow people to do things you don't want them to do with your code, for example access private fields and methods. However, the important thing is that people will not accidentally do this. If they're using reflection, they know they're doing something they probably aren't intended to do, just like no one accidentally picks the lock on your front door.

Answer 2

do we use private methods only for program logic and not for program security?

It is not clear what you mean by "program security". Security cannot be discussed in a vacuum; what resources are you thinking of protecting against what threats?

The CLR code access security system is intended to protect resources of user data from the threat of hostile partially trusted code running on the user's machine.

The relationship between reflection, access control and security in the CLR is therefore complicated. Briefly and not entirely accurately, the rules are these:

• full trust means full trust. Fully trusted code can access every single bit of memory in the process. That includes private fields.

• The ability to reflect on privates in partial trust is controlled by a permission; if it is not granted then partial trust code may not do reflection on privates.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnfa/archive/2006/09/29/777047.aspx for details.

• The desktop CLR supports a mode called "restricted skip visibility" in which the rules for how reflection and the security system interact are slightly different. Basically, partially trusted code that has the right to use private reflection may access a private field via reflection if the partially trusted code is accessing a private field from a type that comes from an assembly with equal or less trust.

See

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnfa/archive/2006/10/05/using-lightweight-codegen-from-partial-trust.aspx

for details

The executive summary is: you can lock partially trusted code down sufficiently that it is not able to use reflection to look at private stuff. You cannot lock down full trust code; that's why it's called "full trust". If you want to restrict it then don't trust it.

So: does making a field private protect it from the threat of low trust code attempting to read it, and thereby steal user's data? Yes. Does it protect it from the threat of high trust code reading it? No. If the code is both trusted by the user and hostile to the user then the user has a big problem. They should not have trusted that code.

Note that for example, making a field private does not protect a secret in your code from a user who has your code and is hostile to you. The security system protects good users from evil code. It doesn't protect good code from evil users. If you want to make something private to keep it from a user then you are on a fool's errand. If you want to make it private to keep a secret from evil hackers who have lured the user into running hostile low-trust code then that is a good technique.

Answer 3

Yes it breaks the encapsulation, if you want it to. However, it can be put to good use - like writing unit tests for private methods, or sometimes - as I have learned from my own experience - getting around bugs in third party APIs :)

Note that encapsulation != security. Encapsulation is an object oriented design concept and is only meant for improving the design. For security, there is SecurityManager in java.

Answer 4

Reflection makes it possible for any CLR class to examine and manipulate properties and fields of other CLR classes, but not necessarily to do so sensibly. It's possible for a class to obscure the meaning of properties and fields or protect them against tampering by having them depend in non-obvious fashion upon each other, static fields, underlying OS info, etc.

For example, a class could keep in some variable an encrypted version of the OS handle for its main window. Using reflection, another class could see that variable, but without knowing the encryption method it could not identify the window to which it belonged or make the variable refer to another window.

I've seen classes that claim to act as "universal serializers"; they can be very useful if applied to something like a data-storage-container class which is missing a "serializable" attribute but is otherwise entirely straightforward. They will produce gobbledygook if applied to any class whose creator has endeavored to obscure things.

Answer 5

access control through private/protected/package/public is not primarily meant for security.

it helps good guys to do the right thing, but doesn't prevent bad guys from doing wrong things.

generally we assume others are good guys, and we include their code into our application without though.

if you can't trust the guy of a library you are including, you are screwed.

Answer 6

Yes, but it is not a problem.

Encapsulation is not about security or secrets, just about organizing things.

Reflection is not part of 'normal' programming. If you want to use it to break encapsulation, you accept the risks (versioning problems etc)

Reflection should only be used when there are no better (less invasive) ways to accomplish something.

Reflection is for system-level 'tooling' like persistence mapping and should be tucked away in well tested libraries. I would find any use of reflection in normal application code suspect.

I started with "it is not a problem". I meant: as long as you use reflection as intended. And careful.