Are there any high abstraction level Cryptography libraries for C#?

Question

CodingHorror's adventure with encryption and Coda Hale's comment on it left me wondering if there are any encryption libraries that offer the type of cryptography services that Coda is describing. Namely providing the correct current methodologies of cryptography for specific purposes. Coda mentions BouncyCastle but that library doesn't provide the the high abstraction of encryption methods that I am looking for.

For instance, if you need to encrypt an email you would choose a method or class specifically for that purpose, but encrypting a short term message such as a query string or state information may be provided in a different class/method. Does such a library exist? Can one that can stay current exist?

Answer 1

It sound like you're looking for something that's drop-dead simple? I don't think you're going to find that. Cryptography is not simple. I would suggest studying up on the classes in the System.Security.Cryptography Namespace. Considering how complicated some of the cryptographic algorithms are, I'd say many of the methods in these classes still qualify as "high level abstractions".

Answer 2

You might want to take a look at an article that Jeff Atwood wrote a long time ago on CodeProject.com

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/security/SimpleEncryption.aspx

You'll still might have to write some wrapper classes to abstract it even more, but it is a good start I think.