Question

My requirement is that I need simple encryption/decryption methods in C# to encrypt and
decrypt an image (maybe gif/jpeg).Simple cause I have to store it in the database in a BLOB field andsome other developers in some other programming language(like java) may need to extract and display this image.I don’t need much security cause its just a matter of “security by obscuring”(life).

Gulp..can someone help…

Answer 1

Since you “don’t need much security” you can probably manage to get by with something like AES (Rijndael). It uses a symmetric-key and there is plenty of help in the .NET framework to make is easy to implement. There is plenty of info in MSDN on the Rijndael class that you might find helpful.

Here is a very stripped down example of encrypt / decrypt methods which can be used for working with byte arrays (binary contents)…

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using System.Security.Cryptography;

public class RijndaelHelper
{
    // Example usage: EncryptBytes(someFileBytes, "SensitivePhrase", "SodiumChloride");
    public static byte[] EncryptBytes(byte[] inputBytes, string passPhrase, string saltValue)
    {
        RijndaelManaged RijndaelCipher = new RijndaelManaged();

        RijndaelCipher.Mode = CipherMode.CBC;
        byte[] salt = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(saltValue);
        PasswordDeriveBytes password = new PasswordDeriveBytes(passPhrase, salt, "SHA1", 2);

        ICryptoTransform Encryptor = RijndaelCipher.CreateEncryptor(password.GetBytes(32), password.GetBytes(16));

        MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
        CryptoStream cryptoStream = new CryptoStream(memoryStream, Encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write);
        cryptoStream.Write(inputBytes, 0, inputBytes.Length);
        cryptoStream.FlushFinalBlock();
        byte[] CipherBytes = memoryStream.ToArray();

        memoryStream.Close();
        cryptoStream.Close();

        return CipherBytes;
    }

    // Example usage: DecryptBytes(encryptedBytes, "SensitivePhrase", "SodiumChloride");
    public static byte[] DecryptBytes(byte[] encryptedBytes, string passPhrase, string saltValue)
    {
        RijndaelManaged RijndaelCipher = new RijndaelManaged();

        RijndaelCipher.Mode = CipherMode.CBC;
        byte[] salt = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(saltValue);
        PasswordDeriveBytes password = new PasswordDeriveBytes(passPhrase, salt, "SHA1", 2);

        ICryptoTransform Decryptor = RijndaelCipher.CreateDecryptor(password.GetBytes(32), password.GetBytes(16));

        MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream(encryptedBytes);
        CryptoStream cryptoStream = new CryptoStream(memoryStream, Decryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Read);
        byte[] plainBytes = new byte[encryptedBytes.Length];

        int DecryptedCount = cryptoStream.Read(plainBytes, 0, plainBytes.Length);

        memoryStream.Close();
        cryptoStream.Close();

        return plainBytes;
    }
}