ASP.NET Core - Data Protection API (DPAPI)

Take advantage of the easy-to-use cryptographic API in ASP.Net Core to secure sensitive data in your applications.
The Data protection stack in ASP.Net Core provides an easy-to-use cryptographic API for protecting data, including the necessary mechanisms for encryption and decryption. This video looks at how we can work with this API when building our ASP.Net Core applications.
Encryption and hashing are two important concepts related to security that are often used interchangeably, but incorrectly. Encryption is a technique of converting data from one form to another using a cryptographic algorithm. It is a two-way function as the data that has been encrypted can only be decrypted using a proper key. The encrypted data is known as cipher text. Encryption is by far the most effective way to secure data in today’s communication systems.
By contrast, hashing is a technique that generates a unique message digest from a string of text. It should be noted that the hashed data is always unique; you cannot produce the same hash value from different text. Further, it is almost impossible to get back the original text from the hashed value. So, while encryption is a two-way technique that includes both encryption and decryption of data using a key, hashing is a one-way technique that changes a string of plain text to a unique digest that cannot easily be reversed back to the original text.

Steps:
- Install the Microsoft.AspNetCore. DataProtection NuGet package:
Install-Package Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection
- Configure the Data Protection API in ASP.Net Core:
The AddDataProtection extension method can be used to configure the Data Protection API.
- Encrypting data with the Data Protection API in ASP.Net Core

[bilal-elmursi]

*The Data Protection API* is easy to use and flexible.
it’s a good choice for _encrypting data_, such as query strings and cookies.
it’s simple and successfully abstracts all of the inner workings (implementation detail) away from the developers.