Encrypting and decrypting strings

Question

Does anyone know of a good way to encrypt and decrypt strings using VB6 to ensure sensitive data is secure?

Also, is there an encryption method that can be shared between VB6 and .NET? Example:

The encrypted string will be written to a database using a VB6 application, but the value also need to be read an decrypted in a c# .net application using the .net framework if possible.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yeah, symmetric encryption algorithms such as AES are pretty standard so as long as you are using the same keys for encryption and decryption there should be absolutely no problem.

Answer 2

Have you looked at System.Security.Cryptography?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryptography.aspx

I would look at the AesCryptoServiceProvider.

Answer 3

You can also try MD5: ** link removed ... malicious software there , sorry **

Answer 4

Rather than putting the work of encrypting / decrypting on the application side, perhaps you could handle the security in the database using the Cryptographic Functions of Transact-SQL? After all, both applications would be connecting to the same database.

Answer 5

My first thoughts would be to use the built-in CryptoAPI which is built-in to the Microsoft operating systems. This would give you the common-ground effect between your VB6 and C# development platforms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_API

Some quick & dirty sample code here: http://www.freevbcode.com/ShowCode.Asp?ID=804

And this is one of the many sites explaining how to do this in C#: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alejacma/archive/2007/11/23/p-invoking-cryptoapi-in-net-c-version.aspx

Answer 6

You could try VBCorLib which supports the same cryptography classes as found in .NET. The crypto classes in VBCorLib provide a nearly identical API as the .NET classes, so the code will be very similar to perform encryption/decryption between the two platforms.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vbcorlib/