Summary

Today, virtually all application developers have to worry about the security of their data in some fashion. This chapter provided you with an introduction into the world of cryptography as it applies to protecting valuable data within your applications. This chapter covered the concepts behind public-key encryption, secret-key encryption, hashing, digital signatures, and using the Data Protection API to protect in-memory structures as well as large amounts of data like streams.

After reading this chapter, you should now be able discuss the various benefits and drawbacks of each type of encryption, when those types should be used in real-world examples, and you should have enough information to be able to create the code for your own secure data solution.