Simple insecure two-way data “obfuscation”?

Question

I\'m looking for very simple obfuscation (like encrypt and decrypt but not necessarily secure) functionality for some data. It\'s not mission critical. I need something to k

Answer 1

Encryption is easy: as others have pointed out, there are classes in the System.Security.Cryptography namespace that do all the work for you. Use them rather than any home-grown solution.

But decryption is easy too. The issue you have is not the encryption algorithm, but protecting access to the key used for decryption.

I would use one of the following solutions:

• DPAPI using the ProtectedData class with CurrentUser scope. This is easy as you don't need to worry about a key. Data can only be decrypted by the same user, so no good for sharing data between users or machines.

• DPAPI using the ProtectedData class with LocalMachine scope. Good for e.g. protecting configuration data on a single secure server. But anyone who can log into the machine can encrypt it, so no good unless the server is secure.

• Any symmetric algorithm. I typically use the static SymmetricAlgorithm.Create() method if I don't care what algorithm is used (in fact it's Rijndael by default). In this case you need to protect your key somehow. E.g. you can obfuscate it in some way and hide it in your code. But be aware that anyone who is smart enough to decompile your code will likely be able to find the key.