DidiSoft .NET Library versus importing cryptographic namespaces

[Steven Ackerman]

Hello All,

I am a student and just finished my first programming class as part of a CS Bachelors degree program. For my final project I did made a program that simply encrypted a file and allowed the user to attach it to an email. I used the trial version of the DidiSoft OpenPGP library for .NET. I'll include the code, just for kicks. Would love to have some comments. There are some things I really struggled with, like allowing the user to choose a password. That seems more like a VB specific problem.

My real question is this. Why do I use this library instead of the importing the cryptographic names spaces? They seem similar, I am really curious. Is it because it uses openPGP? It seems like the best thing out there. Wish I could work with it more. Here's some of my code. It was way outside the scope of my project and the material we addressed in class. I really learned a lot from doing it, but someone else could have whipped this up in a flash I think. It took me many hours and lots of reading. I probably spent close to 40 hours researching this and getting it to work. Unfortunately my program will break in a few days after my trial expires! I'm still working on it anyway, not sure why.

Anyway, thanks in advance. 

Here's the code:

 Dim pgp As New PGPLib()

        ' Specify should the output be ASCII or binary

        Dim asciiArmor As Boolean = True

        REM This allows the user to choose an existing file, encrypt the file and then

        Using ofd As New OpenFileDialog With {.Filter = "Text Files (*.txt)|*.txt"}

            If ofd.ShowDialog() = DialogResult.OK Then

                Using sfd As New SaveFileDialog With {.Filter = "Text Files (*.txt)|*.pgp"}

                    If sfd.ShowDialog() = DialogResult.OK Then

                        pgp.EncryptFilePBE(New FileInfo(ofd.FileName), _

                        "password", _

                        New FileInfo(sfd.FileName), _

                        asciiArmor)

                        strEncryptedFileList = sfd.FileName

                        CryptoActions.lstFiles.Items.Add(strEncryptedFileList)

                    End If

                End Using

            End If

        End Using

        FileListTest = True

[Katerina Topalova]

I've also used this library previously in a school project. My mentor suggested that I should transfer Excel encrypted files over SSH channel. For SSH I used this code http://sshnet.codeplex.com/ and packaged the excel books with the pgp encrypt file methods. I guess that pgp file could be created with the classes from System.Security.Cryptography namespace as I see RSA and other algorithms there, but unfortunately I had only two weeks for this project, including the documentation and this component saved me a lot of work.