Question

I am working over one my student project over .Net4 and MVC3.
Project is almost at completion except some security features such as Encoding/Decoding information for saving in config file such as Connection String etc.

I want to avoid a very complex solution and so I am looking for some easy to use Encryption technique in .NET ideally something where I can just provide a KEY and String and it gives me back the encoded text and vice versa (similar to the Base64 example given below).

I went through MSDN’s System.Security.Cryptography Namespace documentation online but it has a lot of options for a newbie like me I guess.

Kindly provide me with suggestions and path to follow to achieve it.
Thank you.

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While searching I found a simple solution of Base64 which I implemented like this:

    static public string EncodeTo64(string toEncode)
    {
        byte[] toEncodeAsBytes = System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetBytes(toEncode);
        string encodedValue = System.Convert.ToBase64String(toEncodeAsBytes);
        return encodedValue;
    }

    static public string DecodeFrom64(string toDecode)
    {
        var toDecodeAsString = System.Convert.FromBase64String(toDecode);
        string decodedValue = System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString(toDecodeAsString);
        return decodedValue;
    }

Works fine but the problem is as far as I’ve understood this is not something very reliable as a static encoding technique (one without a custom KEY) can be easily decoded and so many online base 64 decoders are available on net. I also tried to work with AES as expalined here but failed to succeed.

Answer 1

For maximum simplicity just have a look at Windows’ Data Protection API (DAPI). This will provide encryption without requiring you to handle the keys.

You can easily use this with the ProtectedData class provided in .NET.