Security

Step 4: IIS 5.0 Loads the Logon Page Logon.asp

Logon.asp is loaded by IIS 5.0 in a separate memory space. This is done for reliability reasons. Eventually, this option will be turned off, once the Web administrators have deemed the code trustworthy and safe. You may wish to run newly written code that has not been thoroughly tested in a separate process. If this code should crash, it will only crash its own process and not the IIS 5.0 process.

Also, Logon.asp includes the following at the top of the page:

<%@ Transaction = Requires_New %>

This tells IIS 5.0 that it must start a new transaction for any component or data access that supports transactions. In the case of Logon.asp, this includes the Microsoft® Visual Basic® 6.0 data access component and the ADO code performing the Oracle query. Component Services is used to control the transaction.

Issues to consider:

Any Web application that is marked to run in a separate memory space (out-of-process) runs in the security context of a special user account called IWAM_computername. However, the process will impersonate the calling user (for example, IUSR_computername) before accessing any resource. You can verify this in the Windows Audit Log.
While not a security limitation per se, keep in mind the transaction semantics that are now in place. If a transactional component fails or explicitly rolls back its part of the transaction, other transactional components will lose their changes.