ASP.NET Core Data Protection using IDataProtectionProvider With Example

Find this Demo on Github

This Process is easier for developers to use solid Cryptographic algorithm to make safe their data in the case you need to encrypt/decrypt your data frequently.

With this,

• If you need to encrypt data, simply pass the data into the protect method.
• If you need to access the data again, pass the encrypted data into the Unprotect method, and it will be converted back into plaintext.

 

By default, it uses 256-bit AES encryption to protect data, which is one of the best choices for an algorithm and It hides all the background task from the developer. Because When you encrypt data, key management becomes a concern.

Step 1

 Create a new console application in .Net core.

Step 2 

Run the below commands in the package manager console.

Install-Package Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection

Install-Package Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection

Use following Namespace on your class.

using System; 

using Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection; 

using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;

If we see on Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection namespace we can see one interface;  IDataProtectionProvider and it contains one method CreateProtector.  

Also, we can see one more interface, IDataProtector, which inherits the IDataProtectionProvider interface. Which includes two different method definitions.

namespace Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection 
{ 
    public interface IDataProtector : IDataProtectionProvider 
    { 
        byte[] Protect(byte[] plaintext); 
        byte[] Unprotect(byte[] protectedData); 
    } 
} 

In the above code snippet, you can see that there are two methods

• Protect - Cryptographically protects a piece of plaintext data.
• Unprotect - Cryptographically unprotects a piece of protected data

Step 3

your main class file look like this

using System;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
namespace DataProtection
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var serviceCollection = new ServiceCollection();
            serviceCollection.AddDataProtection();
            var services = serviceCollection.BuildServiceProvider();
            var instance = ActivatorUtilities.CreateInstance<TestClass>(services);
            instance.RunSample();
        }
        public class TestClass
        {
            IDataProtector _protector;
            // the 'ObjProvider' parameter is provided by DI  
            public TestClass(IDataProtectionProvider ObjProvider)
            {
                _protector = ObjProvider.CreateProtector("Prakash");
            }
            public void RunSample()
            {
                //Read Inputs
                Console.Write("Enter input: ");
                string input = Console.ReadLine();
                //Protect
                string Stringprotected = _protector.Protect(input);
                Console.WriteLine($"Protected String: {Stringprotected}");
                //Unprotect
                string StringUnProtected = _protector.Unprotect(Stringprotected);
                Console.WriteLine($"Unprotected String: {StringUnProtected}");
                Console.ReadLine();
            }
        }
    }
}

In the main method, we are adding data protection services with the help of Dependency Injection and also creating an instance for TestClass using a service provider. Using this instance, we are calling TestClass methods.

Step 4 (output)

Let's Enter one plain text. Then we can see out Protected results as well as Unprotected Plain text as output.

Summary: Finally we can encrypt and decrypt out input.

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