Suggestions for a cheap/free .NET library for doing Zip with AES encryption?

Question

I'm trying to find an zip compression and encryption component with encryption suitable for use by the US Federal Government, so I can't use Zip 2.0 encryption, it has to be AES or the like. I've already found SharpZipLib (can't do AES encyrption), and Chilkat (can do AES encryption, but costs money). Am I missing any other options?

Answer 1

If money is a big issue, you could take an open source library like this http://www.codeplex.com/DotNetZip, which now has AES support

Answer 2

What about 7-Zip? It's open source under the LGPL (so should be usable in your project) and according to the spec it supports ZIP with AES encryption.

Answer 3

Check out this awesome article on the Stream Pipeline. It not only defines a cool way to link streams to each other in a multithreaded fashion, the example used is compression followed by encryption.

Answer 4

How much would you be willing to pay for AES in DotNetZip? ;)

DotNetZip supports AES Encryption, with 128 or 256-bit keys.

http://www.codeplex.com/DotNetZip

Example code:

  using (ZipFile zip = new ZipFile())
  {
    zip.AddFile("ReadMe.txt"); // no password for this entry

    // use a password for subsequent entries
    zip.Password= "This.Encryption.is.FIPS.197.Compliant!";
    zip.Encryption= EncryptionAlgorithm.WinZipAes256;
    zip.AddFile("Rawdata-2008-12-18.csv");
    zip.Save("Backup-AES-Encrypted.zip");
  }

The AES-encrypted zip files produced by DotNetZip can be read and extracted by WinZip, and vice-versa.

You can also just create regular zip files without encryption.

oh, and it's free.