I'm looking for very simple obfuscation (like encrypt and decrypt but not necessarily secure) functionality for some data. It's not mission critical. I need something to keep honest people honest, but something a little stronger than ROT13 or Base64.
I'd prefer something that is already included in the .NET framework 2.0, so I don't have to worry about any external dependencies.
I really don't want to have to mess around with public/private keys, etc. I don't know much about encryption, but I do know enough to know that anything I wrote would be less than worthless… In fact, I'd probably screw up the math and make it trivial to crack.
Best Answer
Other answers here work fine, but AES is a more secure and up-to-date encryption algorithm. This is a class that I obtained a few years ago to perform AES encryption that I have modified over time to be more friendly for web applications (e,g. I've built Encrypt/Decrypt methods that work with URL-friendly string). It also has the methods that work with byte arrays.
NOTE: you should use different values in the Key (32 bytes) and Vector (16 bytes) arrays! You wouldn't want someone to figure out your keys by just assuming that you used this code as-is! All you have to do is change some of the numbers (must be <= 255) in the Key and Vector arrays (I left one invalid value in the Vector array to make sure you do this...). You can use https://www.random.org/bytes/ to generate a new set easily:
Key
Vector
Using it is easy: just instantiate the class and then call (usually) EncryptToString(string StringToEncrypt) and DecryptString(string StringToDecrypt) as methods. It couldn't be any easier (or more secure) once you have this class in place.