Cryptography for Visual Basic: A Programmer's Guide to the Microsoft CryptoAPI Book

The Microsoft CryptoAPI can provide "strong", unbreakable encryption on the Windows platform. If you're a Visual Basic programmer, Richard Bondi's Cryptography for Visual Basic can put this powerful set of APIs within your reach. This title will serve both as an introduction to cryptography and how to do it with CryptoAPI using the author's pre-built library of COM objects.The early part of this book tries hard to put the elements of today's public key encryption standards (like RSA) within the grasp of the VB programmer. You will learn the basics of random number generation, ciphers and keys, as well as the "protocols" of how today's encryption standards work. Inevitably, these are written using a shorthand such as "Alice wants to send Bob a message". The author manages to make essential concepts in cryptography pretty clear.The next section here lays the foundation for working with the Microsoft CryptoAPI by presenting a number of useful strategies for passing (and returning) values to and from C from within VB, along with techniques for error handling and improved performance.The heart of this text is the author's custom library of COM objects that "wrap" the underlying Microsoft CryptoAPI C calls for use from within Visual Basic. Subsequent chapters look at various areas of the CryptoAPI and the resulting COM objects. The author covers not only the assumptions and strategies of working with the CryptoAPI, but also the design choices made in his library. For those in a rush, the book provides sample code on how to use this library in your own VB applications in an appendix.Today security is a concern in any enterprise, so Cryptography fills a useful niche. It explains the basics of encryption technologies, shows off how its done on the Windows platform with the Microsoft CryptoAPI and makes it possible to call these APIs from within VB. If you have wondered how cryptography works, or how it's implemented in Windows, this tutorial can put you on the right track. --Richard DraganRead More