sharepoint 2010 document library ip filtering

Question

I need to set up IP filtering in a SharePoint document library based on a group that a user is a member of. More specifically, we have groups set up for each of our customers. Each group should have an allowed IP address attached to it. When a user accesses this document library, we then need to ensure that the user is coming from the IP address attached to their customer group. The IP filtering would only apply to a single document library, not the entire site.

My only idea so far is to create a webpart that checks the user's IP address and redirects if it isn't correct. Then I could put that webpart at the top of a webpart page, and display the document library webpart below that. That's a little hokey, so I was hoping someone had a better idea.

Answer 1

The problem with your proposed solution of a webpart on the AllItems.aspx page is that there multiple ways to get to a document and this would not prevent someone with a direct URL from accessing the document.

You want to take advantage of SharePoint's permission structure. If the documents can be grouped by security, then you could create one library per customer (or one folder within a single library) and set the permissions based on your SharePoint groups for the library/folder. That may not work for you if you need to have one document that is available to multiple groups.

Another option is to set the library security to be restricted to only one system account. Then you could write a webpart (or application page) that checked the user's IP address and using RunWithElevatedPermissions you could get the contents of the libary that are applicable to that user. That would solve the issue of a direct link because they would have to go through your page to access the documents.