Throughout history, cryptography has been used to confidentially pass messages to different recipients. This has been especially useful in times of war. Up until World War II, with the use of the German enciphering machine Enigma, messages that were encrypted were text-based. With the advent of modern computing, cryptography now tends to operate on raw data and is used to protect our communication channels, email messages, web browsing, financial transactions, and much more. Cryptography is all around us and is, normally, completely transparent to the user. However, just because you can’t see it doesn’t make it any less important. In the modern day, we face threats from cybercrime, terrorists, and our own government snooping on its citizens. Because of these threats, it is very important to understand and apply cryptography in your software solutions.
This book is aimed at .NET developers who want to understand how to use cryptography in their applications. The user is expected to be reasonably experienced as a .NET developer but no prior knowledge of cryptography and encryption is required.
This book is for developers who want to be pragmatic about encrypting data in their applications by using the .NET framework. The examples in this book target writing applications for Windows desktops and servers, which includes technologies such as console applications, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows
