G. Gnana Arun Ganesh - .NET security and cryptography

C#

• Introduction to C# Using .NET

  Oberg

• Application Development Using C# and .NET

  Stiefel/Oberg

INTEROPERABILITY AND MIGRATION

• The .NET and COM Interoperability Handbook

  Gordon

• Migrating to .NET: A Pragmatic Path to VB.NET, Visual C++.NET, and ASP.NET

  Katre/Halari/Surapaneni/Gupta/Deshpande

PERL

• Programming Perl in the .NET Environment

  Menaker/Saltzman/Oberg

VISUAL BASIC

• Application Development Using Visual Basic and .NET

  Oberg/Thorsteinson/Wyatt

• Introduction to Visual Basic Using .NET

  Wyatt/Oberg

VISUAL C++

• .NET Architecture and Programming Using Visual C++

  Thorsteinson/Oberg

.NET APPLICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY

• Fundamentals of Web Applications Using .NET and XML

  Bell/Feng/Soong/Zhang/Zhu

• .NET Security and Cryptography

  Thorsteinson/Ganesh

Over the last several years, security and cryptography technologies have been continually increasing in importance to Windows users and software developers. Additionally, in some respects the security and cryptographic capabilities of 32-bit Windows has reached parity with larger mini and mainframe computing platforms, where security has always been a major priority. Now, with the advent of .NET, these security capabilities have become much easier to implement than ever before. Of course, a significant investment in effort is still required in understanding the concepts and acquiring the skills necessary to leverage the many security features provided by .NET. Indeed, that is exactly what this book is all about. Although much of the same functionality was provided in the form of an arcane Win32 C Windows library, the advent of .NET has made security and cryptography programming much simpler and much more powerful than ever before. The .NET Security Framework provides a powerful set of security and cryptographic classes that are relatively easy to use, and this framework is explored throughout this book.

This book is intended to provide a practical and comprehensive coverage on implementing both cryptography and security functionality on the .NET platform. It is an effective tutorial, providing a large number of clear and focused code examples.

The book is organized into 10 chapters and five appendixes. introduces .NET Web Services security programming.

Each aspect of .NET cryptography and security is dealt with in the proper context and sequence, where they are most relevant and most easily understood. Appendixes describe a few additional topics, such as security attacks and additional cryptography-related mathematical topics.

This book is intended to be a practical tutorial with many succinct programming examples that focus on specific and individual concepts. Also, the focus of the book is on practical .NET security programming rather than on administrative security tasks. This book provides sufficient background information to enable the reader to clearly see why security and cryptography are critically important to modern software development. The goal is to equip the reader to begin building significant applications using the .NET Security Framework. This book is part of The Integrated .NET Series from Object Innovations and Prentice Hall PTR.

The best way to learn about a significant class library such as the .NET Security Framework is to read and write many programs. This book provides many small programs that illustrate each of the pertinent features of .NET in isolation, which makes them easier to understand. The programs are clearly labeled in the text, and they can all be found in the software distribution that accompanies this book. These sample programs are provided in a self-extracting file on the book's Web site. When expanded, a directory structure is created whose default root is c:\OI\NetSecurity . The sample programs, which begin with the second chapter, are in directories Chap02, Chap03 , and so on. All the samples for a given chapter are in individual folders within the chapter directories. The names of the folders are clearly identified in the text.

This book is part of The Integrated .NET Series. The sample programs for other books in the series are located in their own directories underneath \OI , so all the .NET examples from all books in the series will be located in a common area as you install them. These programs are furnished solely for instructional purposes and should not be embedded in any software product. The software (including instructions for use) is provided as is without warranty of any kind.

The Web site for the book series is located at http://www.objectinnovations.com/dotnet.htm.

A link is provided at that Web site for downloading the sample programs for this book.