Pro ASP.NET 4 in VB 2010, Third Edition

Chapter 25. Cryptography

In Chapters 19–23, you learned how to identify users through several supported authentication mechanisms and how to implement authorization for those users in your applications. ASP.NET supports rich services, such as the membership and roles APIs, that help you implement this functionality. However, although authentication and authorization are two important factors for securing applications, you have to keep much more in mind. Therefore, .NET has a bit more functionality in store. One of the most important examples is .NET's support for cryptography—the science of scrambling data to ensure confidentiality and adding hash codes to detect tampering.

.NET includes the rich CryptoAPI for a wide range of cryptographic tasks, ...