Error occurred while decoding OAEP padding

Question

While decrypting text using RSACryptoServiceProvider.Decrypt, I am getting the error:

Error occurred while decoding OAEP padding.

Answer 1

I ran into this exact problem. UnicodeEncoding.GetBytes is not always the inverse of UnicodeEncoding.GetString.

byte[] a = new byte[32];

RandomNumberGenerator gen = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
gen.GetBytes(a);

UnicodeEncoding byteConverter = new UnicodeEncoding();

byte[] b = byteConverter.GetBytes(byteConverter.GetString(a));

//byte array 'a' and byte array 'b' will not always contain the same elements.

This is why RSACryptoServiceProvider.Decrypt fails. A lot of encrypt/decrypt examples on the web use Unicode encoding. Do not use Unicode encoding. Use Convert.FromBase64String and Convert.ToBase64String instead.