ASP.NET MVC Authorization: Permissions in Place of Roles

I agree with @jlew about caching the user's data and when the cache expires - just reload it. There's no use trying to force this data to stay persistent. Additionally, if you want to move away from the ASP.net role providers, you could roll your own security as I've described in this reply. This has the advantage of allowing very custom security solutions for roles/individual permissions.

The following is just an idea that I've been toying around with lately (just some food for thought). Why not use the RESTful urls of MVC to define "permissions". For example:

/tasks/add could define the permission for adding tasks. These could somehow be hierarchical so that giving a user permissions on /tasks/add also gives them permissions on /tasks. Then, you could use a global action filter that would build the URL given the route values. This would also allow really interesting approach for individual item security configurable via runtime. For example, /tasks/edit/23 could somehow grant edit permissions on task with id 23. Anyway, this might not even be helpful at at all... but it's just thought I thought you'd like to maybe consider.

Cheers!

We solve the problem by caching the principal on the server side, so that the "permission roles" do not need to be in the cookie and we do not have to re-load on every request. You can actually get around the cookie size limitation by chunking your cookie data into multiple cookies (Windows Identity Framework does this.) But, you may have bandwidth or other concerns with big cookies.