Introduction
This article is built on top of 'XCrypt' -- the legendary cryptography wrapper which had been around in CodeProject for a while. Unfortunately the original author of the article has left
it unattended for several years. I brought it to the attention of CP Team
here:
http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/4409016/Article-Adoption.aspx and as per the guidance I am submitting this alternative branch.
XCrypt helps as a generic encryption and decryption wrapper for .NET applications. Besides that, it adds the following two algorithms (which are not part of
the .NET Base Class Library):
As of this writing, I did have an observation of another algorithm called 'Blakesharp' (http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/286937/BlakeSharp-A-Csharp-Implementation-of-the-BLAKE-Ha). I have taken a humble initiative to get XCrypt updated in having able to use this algorithm too.
Background
- Basic concepts, BlowFish, TwoFish: Credits to the parent XCrypt
- Blakesharp: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/286937/BlakeSharp-A-Csharp-Implementation-of-the-BLAKE-Ha
Using the code
The sample code initializes the engine to 3DES, you also can call
InitializeEngine
again to reset the engine to a different algorithm.
XCryptEngine xe = new XCryptEngine();
...
xe.InitializeEngine(XCryptEngine.AlgorithmType.TripleDES);
enc_str = xe.Encrypt(src_str);
dec_str = xe.Decrypt(enc_str);
xe.DestroyEngine();
NuGet:
You can get the latest reference to this assembly through NuGet here.
Points of Interest
- XCrypt earns the credit of making me learn different encryption algorithms besides kindling
an interest to explore on them.
- .NET has a good cryptography library but the paucity of documentation in MSDN as an end-to-end solution makes you run pillar to post whilst trying to decide on a particular algorithm.
XCrypt endeavors to fulfill the gap.
Change log:
The following are the changes from the parent
program (XCrypt):
- Included the two BlakeSharp algorithms into XCrypt as I had highlighted.
- The Test Application had hard-coded 'This is a test string' as the initial value.
To make it a bit more realistic I have replaced that with
srcText.Text = Environment.UserName.Length > 0 ? Environment.UserName : "Hello World";
. - The Test Application had bloated piece of code that the algorithm names were repeatedly hard-bound. I have tried replacing that with a quick and small reflection
code (
LoadEnumMembers()
). - The Test Application had a bug that for
hash where decryption would not be possible. I changed this by exposing two more public
methods disabling the Decrypt button for the same.
- I have removed the setup and other projects which might not be of utility for
a lot of users.
History
- First update built on XCrypt in a humble endeavor to make it a one-stop lookup for
a cryptography library in .NET.
- Added a quick clipboard support to the application.
- 8th May 2013: Now you can have XCrypt from within a using block of the application so that memory is elegantly reclaimed.
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar is from Chennai, India who has been in the programming career since 1994, when he was 15 years old. He has his Bachelors of Engineering (in Computer Science and Engineering) from
Vellore Engineering College. He also has a MBA in Systems from
Alagappa University, Karaikudi, India.
He started his programming career with GWBasic and then in his college was involved in developing programs in Fortran, Cobol, C++. He has been developing in Microsoft technologies like ASP, SQLServer 2000.
His current focus is ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET, PHP, SQL Server and MySQL. In his past-time, he listens to polite Carnatic Music. But the big question is that with his current Todolist backlog, does he get some past time?