I’ve recently had to bump up against this again in my own project – and wanted to share the somewhat simpler code that I’ve been using, as this question and series of answers kept coming up in my searches.
I’m not going to get into the security concerns around how often to update things like your Salt and Initialization Vector – that’s a topic for a security forum, and there are some great resources out there to look at. This is simply a block of code to implement AesManaged in C#.
using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Text;
namespace Your.Namespace.Security {
public static class Cryptography {
#region Settings
private static int _iterations = 2;
private static int _keySize = 256;
private static string _hash = "SHA1";
private static string _salt = "aselrias38490a32"; // Random
private static string _vector = "8947az34awl34kjq"; // Random
#endregion
public static string Encrypt(string value, string password) {
return Encrypt<AesManaged>(value, password);
}
public static string Encrypt<T>(string value, string password)
where T : SymmetricAlgorithm, new() {
byte[] vectorBytes = GetBytes<ASCIIEncoding>(_vector);
byte[] saltBytes = GetBytes<ASCIIEncoding>(_salt);
byte[] valueBytes = GetBytes<UTF8Encoding>(value);
byte[] encrypted;
using (T cipher = new T()) {
PasswordDeriveBytes _passwordBytes =
new PasswordDeriveBytes(password, saltBytes, _hash, _iterations);
byte[] keyBytes = _passwordBytes.GetBytes(_keySize / 8);
cipher.Mode = CipherMode.CBC;
using (ICryptoTransform encryptor = cipher.CreateEncryptor(keyBytes, vectorBytes)) {
using (MemoryStream to = new MemoryStream()) {
using (CryptoStream writer = new CryptoStream(to, encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write)) {
writer.Write(valueBytes, 0, valueBytes.Length);
writer.FlushFinalBlock();
encrypted = to.ToArray();
}
}
}
cipher.Clear();
}
return Convert.ToBase64String(encrypted);
}
public static string Decrypt(string value, string password) {
return Decrypt<AesManaged>(value, password);
}
public static string Decrypt<T>(string value, string password) where T : SymmetricAlgorithm, new() {
byte[] vectorBytes = GetBytes<ASCIIEncoding>(_vector);
byte[] saltBytes = GetBytes<ASCIIEncoding>(_salt);
byte[] valueBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(value);
byte[] decrypted;
int decryptedByteCount = 0;
using (T cipher = new T()) {
PasswordDeriveBytes _passwordBytes = new PasswordDeriveBytes(password, saltBytes, _hash, _iterations);
byte[] keyBytes = _passwordBytes.GetBytes(_keySize / 8);
cipher.Mode = CipherMode.CBC;
try {
using (ICryptoTransform decryptor = cipher.CreateDecryptor(keyBytes, vectorBytes)) {
using (MemoryStream from = new MemoryStream(valueBytes)) {
using (CryptoStream reader = new CryptoStream(from, decryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Read)) {
decrypted = new byte[valueBytes.Length];
decryptedByteCount = reader.Read(decrypted, 0, decrypted.Length);
}
}
}
} catch (Exception ex) {
return String.Empty;
}
cipher.Clear();
}
return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(decrypted, 0, decryptedByteCount);
}
}
}
The code is very simple to use. It literally just requires the following:
string encrypted = Cryptography.Encrypt(data, "testpass");
string decrypted = Cryptography.Decrypt(encrypted, "testpass");
By default, the implementation uses AesManaged – but you could actually also insert any other SymmetricAlgorithm. A list of the available SymmetricAlgorithm inheritors for .NET 4.5 can be found at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryptography.symmetricalgorithm.aspx
As of the time of this post, the current list includes:
AesManagedRijndaelManagedDESCryptoServiceProviderRC2CryptoServiceProviderTripleDESCryptoServiceProvider
To use RijndaelManaged with the code above, as an example, you would use:
string encrypted = Cryptography.Encrypt<RijndaelManaged>(dataToEncrypt, password);
string decrypted = Cryptography.Decrypt<RijndaelManaged>(encrypted, password);
I hope this is helpful to someone out there.