Cryptography

Now that we have a solid foundation of both security and how ASP.NET is put together, it’s time to start diving into code that you can use in your own projects. Let’s start with cryptography, the study of protecting information by obscuring it. There have been many cryptographic algorithms used throughout history, from one of the earliest-known Caesar cipher, which involves shifting the alphabet X characters over (e.g., shifting “abcdef” two characters over would result in “cdefgh”), to the RSA algorithm used for asymmetric encryption. Rather than try to give a comprehensive treatment to cryptography here, which would be the subject of at least one book by itself, let’s just explore the most common algorithms that you’ll need to know as an ASP.NET Core programmer.