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Encrypt/Decrypt string using any length password/passphrase

I just know I will get referenced to a billion SO questions, BUT, everytime I try to use one for use with .net Maui and therefore using .Net 6 and to be .Net 7 I get a warning about OBSOLETE (and deprecated) functions. I can't tell you how many solutions I've tried. And of course I simply don't have the brains or time to dig deep.
So I'd be very grateful if someone could simply post some code that does the following:
(password could be ANY length, but I'll accept restrictions, but min 4 chars (like a pin). Yes I know it might not be very secure, but it's all I need for my use case.)
public static string Encrypt(string plainText, string password)
{
}
public static string Decrypt(string cipherText, string password)
{
}
I have seen that there are all kinds of extras like salts and pbkdf2 for hashing the password, but I'd really like all that gubbins to be hidden from me, so I don't have to bother. But please feel free to add explanations of why I should bother...
Many thanks and please be gentle. :)

So I seem to have figured out a solution using
https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/encryption-and-decryption-using-a-symmetric-key-in-c-sharp/
generating AES 256 bit key value
namespace Census.Classes;
public static class EncryptionHelper
{
public static string Encrypt(string plainText, byte[] encryptionKeyBytes)
{
byte[] iv = new byte[16];
byte[] array;
using (Aes aes = Aes.Create())
{
aes.Key = encryptionKeyBytes;
aes.IV = iv;
ICryptoTransform encryptor = aes.CreateEncryptor(aes.Key, aes.IV);
using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new())
{
using (CryptoStream cryptoStream = new((Stream)memoryStream, encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write))
{
using (StreamWriter streamWriter = new((Stream)cryptoStream))
{
streamWriter.Write(plainText);
}
array = memoryStream.ToArray();
}
}
}
return Convert.ToBase64String(array);
}
public static string Decrypt(string cipherText, byte[] encryptionKeyBytes)
{
byte[] iv = new byte[16];
byte[] buffer = Convert.FromBase64String(cipherText);
using (Aes aes = Aes.Create())
{
aes.Key = encryptionKeyBytes;
aes.IV = iv;
ICryptoTransform decryptor = aes.CreateDecryptor(aes.Key, aes.IV);
using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new(buffer))
{
using (CryptoStream cryptoStream = new((Stream)memoryStream, decryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Read))
{
using (StreamReader streamReader = new((Stream)cryptoStream))
{
return streamReader.ReadToEnd();
}
}
}
}
}
private static readonly byte[] Salt = new byte[] { 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 };
public static byte[] CreateKey(string password, int keyBytes = 32)
{
const int Iterations = 300;
var keyGenerator = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(password, Salt, Iterations);
return keyGenerator.GetBytes(keyBytes);
}
}
I use it as follows:
//get an encryption key from the password
byte[] encryptionKeyBytes = EncryptionHelper.CreateKey(Password);
mystring = EncryptionHelper.Encrypt(plaintext, encryptionKeyBytes);
I do it like this because I call it very many times.
I'd be grateful if someone more knowledgeable could cast their eye over it and see if there are any improvements that could be made, but at least it works and doesn't throw up any errors about obsolete or deprecated code - yay! :)

If you want to store a secret on a particular computer only, and for a particular username then use the ProtectedData class provided in System.Security.Cryptography.
public static string Encrypt(string plainText, string password = null)
{
var data = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(plainText);
var pwd = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(password) ? Encoding.Default.GetBytes(password) : Array.Empty<byte>();
var cipher = ProtectedData.Protect(data, pwd, DataProtectionScope.CurrentUser);
return Convert.ToBase64String(cipher);
}
public static string Decrypt(string cipherText, string password = null)
{
var cipher = Convert.FromBase64String(cipherText);
var pwd = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(password) ? Encoding.Default.GetBytes(password) : Array.Empty<byte>();
var data = ProtectedData.Unprotect(cipher, pwd, DataProtectionScope.CurrentUser);
return Encoding.Default.GetString(data);
}
it used the windows cryptographic store to keep the secret. Optionally you can make it available to all users of the machine (provided they have the password) by changing the scope to DataProtectionScope.LocalMachine.
Note that the password is optional, as it uses your windows credentials for key generation.

How to convert CryptoJS decryption code into C#?

I have this code in CryptoJS, inside browser:
var decrypt = function (cipherText) {
var key = "a_long_key_goes_here";
var iv = "initial_vector_goes_here";
key = CryptoJS.enc.Hex.parse(key);
iv = CryptoJS.enc.Hex.parse(iv);
var decrypted = CryptoJS.TripleDES.decrypt({
ciphertext: CryptoJS.enc.Hex.parse(cipherText)
}, key, {
iv: iv,
mode: CryptoJS.mode.CBC
});
var clearText = decrypted.toString(CryptoJS.enc.Utf8);
return clearText;
};
This code is not written by me. Also the cipherText come from another server that I have no access to. However, I have access to key and to iv.
I can decrypt that cipherText inside a browser's console. But I want to use these keys to decrypt that cipherText inside C# code. Here's the code I've written:
public void Desrypt()
{
ICryptoTransform decryptor;
UTF8Encoding encoder;
string key = "a_long_key_goes_here";
string iv = "initial_vector_goes_here";
var cipherText = "cipher_text_goes_here";
string clearText = "";
byte[] cipherBytes = FromHexString(cipherText);
using (Aes aes = Aes.Create())
{
Rfc2898DeriveBytes pdb = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(key, new byte[] { });
aes.Key = pdb.GetBytes(32);
aes.IV = pdb.GetBytes(16);
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
using (CryptoStream cs = new CryptoStream(ms, aes.CreateDecryptor(), CryptoStreamMode.Write))
{
cs.Write(cipherBytes, 0, cipherBytes.Length);
cs.Close();
}
clearText = Encoding.Unicode.GetString(ms.ToArray());
}
}
return clearText;
}
public static byte[] FromHexString(string hexString)
{
var bytes = new byte[hexString.Length / 2];
for (var i = 0; i < bytes.Length; i++)
{
bytes[i] = Convert.ToByte(hexString.Substring(i * 2, 2), 16);
}
return bytes;
}
I have some problems though. I don't understand if I'm correctly decoding the given cipherText from hexadecimal or not. Also I can't instantiate Rfc2898DeriveBytes, because I don't know what the second parameter (salt) should be.
Also I don't know where should I use that iv I've gotten from the CryptoJS code.
Could you please help?

So that both codes are compatible, the following changes of the C# code are necessary:
The return type of the Decrypt method must be changed from void to string.
Key and IV have to be decoded hexadecimal like the ciphertext with FromHexString.
Instead of AES, TripleDES must be used.
Rfc2898DeriveBytes implements PBKDF2 and must not be applied (since the JavaScript code does not use PBKDF2 either).
The decrypted data must not be decoded with Encoding.Unicode (which corresponds to UTF16LE in .NET), but with Encoding.UTF8.
The C# code can handle 24 bytes keys (to support 3TDEA) and 16 bytes keys (to support the less secure 2TDEA). The posted CryptoJS code also handles these key sizes plus additionally 8 bytes keys (to support the least secure, DES compatible variant 1TDEA).
The following C# code decrypts a ciphertext generated with CryptoJS and 3TDEA:
public string Decrypt()
{
byte[] key = FromHexString("000102030405060708090a0b0c0d0e0f1011121314151617"); // 24 bytes (3TDEA)
byte[] iv = FromHexString("0001020304050607"); // 8 bytes
byte[] ciphertext = FromHexString("2116057c372e0e95dbe91fbfd148371b8e9974187b71e7c018de89c757280ad342d4191d29472040ee70d19015b025e1");
string plaintext = "";
using (TripleDES tdes = TripleDES.Create())
{
tdes.Key = key;
tdes.IV = iv;
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
using (CryptoStream cs = new CryptoStream(ms, tdes.CreateDecryptor(tdes.Key, tdes.IV), CryptoStreamMode.Write))
{
cs.Write(ciphertext, 0, ciphertext.Length);
}
plaintext = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ms.ToArray());
}
}
return plaintext;
}
The decryption is also possible with the posted JavaScript code, which shows the functional equivalence of both codes.
Note: Since AES is more performant than TripleDES, AES should be used if possible.

C# to node crypto hashing - md5 and sha256

Here is the C# code I'm trying to port into Node crypto, but since I don't know c# it's proving a little tricky!
public static string EncryptStringToBytes_Aes(string username, string password)
{
string encrypted = string.Empty;
byte[] clearBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(password);
Console.WriteLine("1." + clearBytes);
using (Aes aesAlg = Aes.Create())
{
byte[] k; byte[] iv;
byte[] bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(username);
k = SHA256.Create().ComputeHash(bytes);
iv = MD5.Create().ComputeHash(bytes);
aesAlg.Key = k;
aesAlg.IV = iv;
ICryptoTransform encryptor = aesAlg.CreateEncryptor(aesAlg.Key, aesAlg.IV);
using (MemoryStream msEncrypt = new MemoryStream())
{
using (CryptoStream csEncrypt = new CryptoStream(msEncrypt, encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write)) {
csEncrypt.Write(clearBytes, 0, clearBytes.Length); }
encrypted = Convert.ToBase64String(msEncrypt.ToArray());
}
}
return encrypted;
}
C# repl:
https://repl.it/#HarryLincoln/NegligiblePoisedHexagon
Node workings:
crypto.createCipheriv() definitely looks like the way to go, but the I don't believe the c# methods (SHA256.Create() & MD5.Create()) care for the length of the key and iv - but crypto.createCipheriv() does.
The c# uses a CryptoStream: So I think some kind of Buffer is in order looking at some similar C# -> Node crypto stuff
Would really appreciate some help!

.Net Framework - AES encryption uses a 256 bit key and CBC mode and PKCS7 padding by default.
The code to port is very simple to read, it just does this:
return
BASE64 (
AES_ENCRYPT (
password,
Key: SHA256(username),
IV: MD5(username)
)
)
The same can easily be achieved on Node.
const crypto = require('crypto');
const key = crypto.createHash('sha256').update('username', 'utf8').digest();
const iv = crypto.createHash('md5').update('username', 'utf8').digest();
const encryptor = crypto.createCipheriv("aes-256-cbc", key, iv);
var crypted = Buffer.concat([encryptor.update('password', 'utf8'), encryptor.final()]);
let base64data = crypted.toString('base64');
console.log(base64data);

Encrypting & Decrypting a String in C# [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Encrypt and decrypt a string in C#? [closed]
(29 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
What is the most modern (best) way of satisfying the following in C#?
string encryptedString = SomeStaticClass.Encrypt(sourceString);
string decryptedString = SomeStaticClass.Decrypt(encryptedString);
BUT with a minimum of fuss involving salts, keys, mucking about with byte[], etc.
Been Googling and confused at what I'm finding (you can see the list of similar SO Qs to see this is a deceptive question to ask).

UPDATE 23/Dec/2015: Since this answer seems to be getting a lot of upvotes, I've updated it to fix silly bugs and to generally improve the code based upon comments and feedback. See the end of the post for a list of specific improvements.
As other people have said, Cryptography is not simple so it's best to avoid "rolling your own" encryption algorithm.
You can, however, "roll your own" wrapper class around something like the built-in RijndaelManaged cryptography class.
Rijndael is the algorithmic name of the current Advanced Encryption Standard, so you're certainly using an algorithm that could be considered "best practice".
The RijndaelManaged class does indeed normally require you to "muck about" with byte arrays, salts, keys, initialization vectors etc. but this is precisely the kind of detail that can be somewhat abstracted away within your "wrapper" class.
The following class is one I wrote a while ago to perform exactly the kind of thing you're after, a simple single method call to allow some string-based plaintext to be encrypted with a string-based password, with the resulting encrypted string also being represented as a string. Of course, there's an equivalent method to decrypt the encrypted string with the same password.
Unlike the first version of this code, which used the exact same salt and IV values every time, this newer version will generate random salt and IV values each time. Since salt and IV must be the same between the encryption and decryption of a given string, the salt and IV is prepended to the cipher text upon encryption and extracted from it again in order to perform the decryption. The result of this is that encrypting the exact same plaintext with the exact same password gives and entirely different ciphertext result each time.
The "strength" of using this comes from using the RijndaelManaged class to perform the encryption for you, along with using the Rfc2898DeriveBytes function of the System.Security.Cryptography namespace which will generate your encryption key using a standard and secure algorithm (specifically, PBKDF2) based upon the string-based password you supply. (Note this is an improvement of the first version's use of the older PBKDF1 algorithm).
Finally, it's important to note that this is still unauthenticated encryption. Encryption alone provides only privacy (i.e. message is unknown to 3rd parties), whilst authenticated encryption aims to provide both privacy and authenticity (i.e. recipient knows message was sent by the sender).
Without knowing your exact requirements, it's difficult to say whether the code here is sufficiently secure for your needs, however, it has been produced to deliver a good balance between relative simplicity of implementation vs "quality". For example, if your "receiver" of an encrypted string is receiving the string directly from a trusted "sender", then authentication may not even be necessary.
If you require something more complex, and which offers authenticated encryption, check out this post for an implementation.
Here's the code:
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
namespace EncryptStringSample
{
public static class StringCipher
{
// This constant is used to determine the keysize of the encryption algorithm in bits.
// We divide this by 8 within the code below to get the equivalent number of bytes.
private const int Keysize = 256;
// This constant determines the number of iterations for the password bytes generation function.
private const int DerivationIterations = 1000;
public static string Encrypt(string plainText, string passPhrase)
{
// Salt and IV is randomly generated each time, but is preprended to encrypted cipher text
// so that the same Salt and IV values can be used when decrypting.
var saltStringBytes = Generate256BitsOfRandomEntropy();
var ivStringBytes = Generate256BitsOfRandomEntropy();
var plainTextBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(plainText);
using (var password = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(passPhrase, saltStringBytes, DerivationIterations))
{
var keyBytes = password.GetBytes(Keysize / 8);
using (var symmetricKey = new RijndaelManaged())
{
symmetricKey.BlockSize = 256;
symmetricKey.Mode = CipherMode.CBC;
symmetricKey.Padding = PaddingMode.PKCS7;
using (var encryptor = symmetricKey.CreateEncryptor(keyBytes, ivStringBytes))
{
using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
{
using (var cryptoStream = new CryptoStream(memoryStream, encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write))
{
cryptoStream.Write(plainTextBytes, 0, plainTextBytes.Length);
cryptoStream.FlushFinalBlock();
// Create the final bytes as a concatenation of the random salt bytes, the random iv bytes and the cipher bytes.
var cipherTextBytes = saltStringBytes;
cipherTextBytes = cipherTextBytes.Concat(ivStringBytes).ToArray();
cipherTextBytes = cipherTextBytes.Concat(memoryStream.ToArray()).ToArray();
memoryStream.Close();
cryptoStream.Close();
return Convert.ToBase64String(cipherTextBytes);
}
}
}
}
}
}
public static string Decrypt(string cipherText, string passPhrase)
{
// Get the complete stream of bytes that represent:
// [32 bytes of Salt] + [32 bytes of IV] + [n bytes of CipherText]
var cipherTextBytesWithSaltAndIv = Convert.FromBase64String(cipherText);
// Get the saltbytes by extracting the first 32 bytes from the supplied cipherText bytes.
var saltStringBytes = cipherTextBytesWithSaltAndIv.Take(Keysize / 8).ToArray();
// Get the IV bytes by extracting the next 32 bytes from the supplied cipherText bytes.
var ivStringBytes = cipherTextBytesWithSaltAndIv.Skip(Keysize / 8).Take(Keysize / 8).ToArray();
// Get the actual cipher text bytes by removing the first 64 bytes from the cipherText string.
var cipherTextBytes = cipherTextBytesWithSaltAndIv.Skip((Keysize / 8) * 2).Take(cipherTextBytesWithSaltAndIv.Length - ((Keysize / 8) * 2)).ToArray();
using (var password = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(passPhrase, saltStringBytes, DerivationIterations))
{
var keyBytes = password.GetBytes(Keysize / 8);
using (var symmetricKey = new RijndaelManaged())
{
symmetricKey.BlockSize = 256;
symmetricKey.Mode = CipherMode.CBC;
symmetricKey.Padding = PaddingMode.PKCS7;
using (var decryptor = symmetricKey.CreateDecryptor(keyBytes, ivStringBytes))
{
using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream(cipherTextBytes))
{
using (var cryptoStream = new CryptoStream(memoryStream, decryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Read))
using (var streamReader = new StreamReader(cryptoStream, Encoding.UTF8))
{
return streamReader.ReadToEnd();
}
}
}
}
}
}
private static byte[] Generate256BitsOfRandomEntropy()
{
var randomBytes = new byte[32]; // 32 Bytes will give us 256 bits.
using (var rngCsp = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider())
{
// Fill the array with cryptographically secure random bytes.
rngCsp.GetBytes(randomBytes);
}
return randomBytes;
}
}
}
The above class can be used quite simply with code similar to the following:
using System;
namespace EncryptStringSample
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine("Please enter a password to use:");
string password = Console.ReadLine();
Console.WriteLine("Please enter a string to encrypt:");
string plaintext = Console.ReadLine();
Console.WriteLine("");
Console.WriteLine("Your encrypted string is:");
string encryptedstring = StringCipher.Encrypt(plaintext, password);
Console.WriteLine(encryptedstring);
Console.WriteLine("");
Console.WriteLine("Your decrypted string is:");
string decryptedstring = StringCipher.Decrypt(encryptedstring, password);
Console.WriteLine(decryptedstring);
Console.WriteLine("");
Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit...");
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
(You can download a simple VS2013 sample solution (which includes a few unit tests) here).
UPDATE 23/Dec/2015:
The list of specific improvements to the code are:
Fixed a silly bug where encoding was different between encrypting and
decrypting. As the mechanism by which salt & IV values are generated has changed, encoding is no longer necessary.
Due to the salt/IV change, the previous code comment that incorrectly indicated that UTF8 encoding a 16 character string produces 32 bytes is no longer applicable (as encoding is no longer necessary).
Usage of the superseded PBKDF1 algorithm has been replaced with usage of the more modern PBKDF2 algorithm.
The password derivation is now properly salted whereas previously it wasn't salted at all (another silly bug squished).

using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
public static class EncryptionHelper
{
public static string Encrypt(string clearText)
{
string EncryptionKey = "abc123";
byte[] clearBytes = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(clearText);
using (Aes encryptor = Aes.Create())
{
Rfc2898DeriveBytes pdb = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(EncryptionKey, new byte[] { 0x49, 0x76, 0x61, 0x6e, 0x20, 0x4d, 0x65, 0x64, 0x76, 0x65, 0x64, 0x65, 0x76 });
encryptor.Key = pdb.GetBytes(32);
encryptor.IV = pdb.GetBytes(16);
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
using (CryptoStream cs = new CryptoStream(ms, encryptor.CreateEncryptor(), CryptoStreamMode.Write))
{
cs.Write(clearBytes, 0, clearBytes.Length);
cs.Close();
}
clearText = Convert.ToBase64String(ms.ToArray());
}
}
return clearText;
}
public static string Decrypt(string cipherText)
{
string EncryptionKey = "abc123";
cipherText = cipherText.Replace(" ", "+");
byte[] cipherBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(cipherText);
using (Aes encryptor = Aes.Create())
{
Rfc2898DeriveBytes pdb = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(EncryptionKey, new byte[] { 0x49, 0x76, 0x61, 0x6e, 0x20, 0x4d, 0x65, 0x64, 0x76, 0x65, 0x64, 0x65, 0x76 });
encryptor.Key = pdb.GetBytes(32);
encryptor.IV = pdb.GetBytes(16);
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
using (CryptoStream cs = new CryptoStream(ms, encryptor.CreateDecryptor(), CryptoStreamMode.Write))
{
cs.Write(cipherBytes, 0, cipherBytes.Length);
cs.Close();
}
cipherText = Encoding.Unicode.GetString(ms.ToArray());
}
}
return cipherText;
}
}

If you are targeting ASP.NET Core that does not support RijndaelManaged yet, you can use IDataProtectionProvider.
First, configure your application to use data protection:
public class Startup
{
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
services.AddDataProtection();
}
// ...
}
Then you'll be able to inject IDataProtectionProvider instance and use it to encrypt/decrypt data:
public class MyService : IService
{
private const string Purpose = "my protection purpose";
private readonly IDataProtectionProvider _provider;
public MyService(IDataProtectionProvider provider)
{
_provider = provider;
}
public string Encrypt(string plainText)
{
var protector = _provider.CreateProtector(Purpose);
return protector.Protect(plainText);
}
public string Decrypt(string cipherText)
{
var protector = _provider.CreateProtector(Purpose);
return protector.Unprotect(cipherText);
}
}
See this article for more details.

Try this class:
public class DataEncryptor
{
TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider symm;
#region Factory
public DataEncryptor()
{
this.symm = new TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider();
this.symm.Padding = PaddingMode.PKCS7;
}
public DataEncryptor(TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider keys)
{
this.symm = keys;
}
public DataEncryptor(byte[] key, byte[] iv)
{
this.symm = new TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider();
this.symm.Padding = PaddingMode.PKCS7;
this.symm.Key = key;
this.symm.IV = iv;
}
#endregion
#region Properties
public TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider Algorithm
{
get { return symm; }
set { symm = value; }
}
public byte[] Key
{
get { return symm.Key; }
set { symm.Key = value; }
}
public byte[] IV
{
get { return symm.IV; }
set { symm.IV = value; }
}
#endregion
#region Crypto
public byte[] Encrypt(byte[] data) { return Encrypt(data, data.Length); }
public byte[] Encrypt(byte[] data, int length)
{
try
{
// Create a MemoryStream.
var ms = new MemoryStream();
// Create a CryptoStream using the MemoryStream
// and the passed key and initialization vector (IV).
var cs = new CryptoStream(ms,
symm.CreateEncryptor(symm.Key, symm.IV),
CryptoStreamMode.Write);
// Write the byte array to the crypto stream and flush it.
cs.Write(data, 0, length);
cs.FlushFinalBlock();
// Get an array of bytes from the
// MemoryStream that holds the
// encrypted data.
byte[] ret = ms.ToArray();
// Close the streams.
cs.Close();
ms.Close();
// Return the encrypted buffer.
return ret;
}
catch (CryptographicException ex)
{
Console.WriteLine("A cryptographic error occured: {0}", ex.Message);
}
return null;
}
public string EncryptString(string text)
{
return Convert.ToBase64String(Encrypt(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text)));
}
public byte[] Decrypt(byte[] data) { return Decrypt(data, data.Length); }
public byte[] Decrypt(byte[] data, int length)
{
try
{
// Create a new MemoryStream using the passed
// array of encrypted data.
MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(data);
// Create a CryptoStream using the MemoryStream
// and the passed key and initialization vector (IV).
CryptoStream cs = new CryptoStream(ms,
symm.CreateDecryptor(symm.Key, symm.IV),
CryptoStreamMode.Read);
// Create buffer to hold the decrypted data.
byte[] result = new byte[length];
// Read the decrypted data out of the crypto stream
// and place it into the temporary buffer.
cs.Read(result, 0, result.Length);
return result;
}
catch (CryptographicException ex)
{
Console.WriteLine("A cryptographic error occured: {0}", ex.Message);
}
return null;
}
public string DecryptString(string data)
{
return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Decrypt(Convert.FromBase64String(data))).TrimEnd('\0');
}
#endregion
}
and use it like this:
string message="A very secret message here.";
DataEncryptor keys=new DataEncryptor();
string encr=keys.EncryptString(message);
// later
string actual=keys.DecryptString(encr);

If you need to store a password in memory and would like to have it encrypted you should use SecureString:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.securestring.aspx
For more general uses I would use a FIPS approved algorithm such as Advanced Encryption Standard, formerly known as Rijndael. See this page for an implementation example:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryptography.rijndael.aspx

You may be looking for the ProtectedData class, which encrypts data using the user's logon credentials.

The easiest way that I've seen to do encryption is through RSA
Check out the MSDN on it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryptography.rsacryptoserviceprovider.aspx
It does involve using bytes, but when it comes down to it you kind of do want encryption and decryption to be tough to figure out otherwise it will be easy to hack.

C# Encryption Algorithms

There are many answers on the internet regarding encryption, but I have been unable to find exactly what I'm looking for: simple strong encryption using the tools that c# provides to encrypt strings and text files.
My main problem is that I don't know how to save the IV into the beginning of the text file or how to create a random IV. I have an example on crypto stream and I have seen an example on DES, but they use the same IV and key and that is (by what I know) not a good thing to do.

You're right, using the same IV is a bad practice, especially if either the Key or IV are hard coded. I'd recommend using the AesManaged class. It uses the AES algorithm, the current standard. Generating an IV is fairly simple:
var aes = new AesManaged(); //Set your KeySize if you will generate a key too.
aes.GenerateIV();
var iv = aes.IV;
That's a simple way of getting a new initialization vector. If your goal is to encrypt a file, you can store the File, but what will you do with the Key? Hard coding it within your application is generally not a very good way of doing it. If your application will be password based, then you can generate the key from Rfc2898DeriveBytes to get a byte array based on a password. This way, your application never knows what the encryption key is.
Here is an example for writing the IV to a file, then the file contents.
using (AesManaged aes = new AesManaged())
{
//Set the Key here.
aes.GenerateIV();
using (var transform = aes.CreateEncryptor())
{
using (var fileStream = new FileStream("C:\\in.txt", FileMode.Open))
{
using (var saveTo = new FileStream("C:\\out.txt", FileMode.Create))
{
using (var cryptoStream = new CryptoStream(saveTo, transform,CryptoStreamMode.Write))
{
var iv = aes.IV;
cryptoStream.Write(iv, 0, iv.Length);
fileStream.CopyTo(cryptoStream);
}
}
}
}
}

see the example on following link, it will create a string encryption with hash, salt and VI key.
https://github.com/salahuddinuk/Encryption-Decryption/blob/master/EncryptDecrypt/Form1.cs
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Windows.Forms;
namespace EncryptDecrypt
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
static readonly string PasswordHash = "P!!Sw0rd~";
static readonly string SaltKey = "Sa~LT~KEY";
static readonly string VIKey = "#1B2c3D4#e5F6<7H8<.";
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
private void btn_Process_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
try
{
lbl_Error.Text = "";
if (chb_Decrypt.Checked == true)
txt_Result.Text = Decrypt(txt_Value.Text);
else
txt_Result.Text = Encrypt(txt_Value.Text);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
lbl_Error.Text = ex.Message;
}
}
public static string Encrypt(string plainText)
{
byte[] plainTextBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(plainText);
byte[] keyBytes = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(PasswordHash, Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(SaltKey)).GetBytes(256 / 8);
var symmetricKey = new RijndaelManaged() { Mode = CipherMode.CBC, Padding = PaddingMode.Zeros };
var encryptor = symmetricKey.CreateEncryptor(keyBytes, Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(VIKey));
byte[] cipherTextBytes;
using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
{
using (var cryptoStream = new CryptoStream(memoryStream, encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write))
{
cryptoStream.Write(plainTextBytes, 0, plainTextBytes.Length);
cryptoStream.FlushFinalBlock();
cipherTextBytes = memoryStream.ToArray();
cryptoStream.Close();
}
memoryStream.Close();
}
return Convert.ToBase64String(cipherTextBytes);
}
public static string Decrypt(string encryptedText)
{
byte[] cipherTextBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(encryptedText);
byte[] keyBytes = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(PasswordHash, Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(SaltKey)).GetBytes(256 / 8);
var symmetricKey = new RijndaelManaged() { Mode = CipherMode.CBC, Padding = PaddingMode.None };
var decryptor = symmetricKey.CreateDecryptor(keyBytes, Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(VIKey));
var memoryStream = new MemoryStream(cipherTextBytes);
var cryptoStream = new CryptoStream(memoryStream, decryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Read);
byte[] plainTextBytes = new byte[cipherTextBytes.Length];
int decryptedByteCount = cryptoStream.Read(plainTextBytes, 0, plainTextBytes.Length);
memoryStream.Close();
cryptoStream.Close();
return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(plainTextBytes, 0, decryptedByteCount).TrimEnd("\0".ToCharArray());
}
}
}

Nowadays, AesGcm would be an appropriate class and algorithm to use. Examples code for it is easy enough to find, and its API is fairly straightforward.
To generate the IV/nonce, use RandomNumberGenerator.Fill to populate an array of the correct size, which is 12 bytes (96 bits) for AES-GCM. RandomNumberGenerator is the cryptographically-secure one.
As for writing the IV to the file, that is up to you. Are you writing to a file stream? Then start by writing the IV, and then proceed to write the ciphertext. For AES-GCM, we would also write the tag, which will give us not just encryption, but authenticated encryption, i.e. on decryption we can confirm that the ciphertext has not been tampered with.
When reading such a file back in, we read each of the components separately - IV, ciphertext, and tag. Since you know how you wrote them, you know how to read them. For example, x bytes IV, then y bytes tag, then the remaining bytes ciphertext, if that is how you wrote the data to the file.
Pass the components to AesGcm.Decrypt and voila.