Encoding/Decoding Web Service: Web Service Provider - What Does the Service Do?

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It is often necessary in the best interests of security to obfuscate data from prying eyes. Strong encryption of authentication information and data is one of the best ways. However, in some cases it is sufficient to make the data difficult to read. For example, the information in a connection string has several items whose security is highly desired. Keeping this information in clear text is obviously not desirable. In this case, the data can be transformed into something that is difficult to read. The System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.ASCII class provides methods that can be used to encode data. The service described in this tutorial carries out this transformation.

Clearly this data is readable,

workstation id=XPHTEK;
packet size=4096;
integrated security=SSPI;
data source='XPHTEK\NetSDK';
persist security info=False;
initial catalog=Northwind

whereas this transformed data using Base64 encoding is not.

d29ya3N0YXRpb24gaWQ9WFBIVEVLO3BhY2tldCBza
XplPTQwOTY7aW50ZWdyYXRlZCBzZWN1cml0eT1TU1
BJO2RhdGEgc291cmNlPSJYUEhURUtcTmV0U0RLIjt
wZXJzaXN0IHNlY3VyaXR5IGluZm89RmFsc2U7aW5p
dGlhbCBjYXRhbG9nPU5vcnRod2luZA==

Next: Configuring the Web Service >>
 

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