AES/Rijndael Encryption

Posted on 07. August 2008

I’ve been pretty busy with work lately, but it has been very interesting. The past couple of days I’ve been working with the AES/Rijndael to encrypt sensitive user data in the application I’m currently working on. It has been pretty interesting and has proven to be quite a learning experience.

The main reason it has been a challenge is that some of this data that we’re encrypting needs to be decrypted and searched through for reports. We have already decided on using SQL Server Reporting Services (which I haven’t worked with before) to handle these reports, however there was the question of decrypting these fields through SQL Server. Luckily we should be able to create CLR User-Defined functions to handle this.

I have also spent some time cleaning up the solution. This particular project has been going on for the past year and a half (or so) and has had quite a few hands touching it. I went ahead and organized the projects in the solution and fixed the dependency problems that everyone had been just dealing with for the past year or so. I think taking care of these issues will make my life a lot easier in the long run.

Looking for AES encryption using Adobe Flex?
I get a lot of hits from people searching about how to use AES encryption in an Adobe Flex application. My experience with Adobe Flex has been fairly limited, however I have found this package which should allow you to introduce AES encryption into your application. Please check out the AES Encryption Code Base for Air and Flex 3 in the Flex 3 Cookbook!