The web.config file is human readable, and not encoded - meaning, yes, if
you are concerned with security, you should encrypt (or store elsewhere)
sensitive data like connection strings. The web.config file is a means of
altering the state of an application while it's running, without shutting
down services.
One solution is to encrypt the connection string (or any sensitive data)
using the available crypto classes in the security assembly. Then you can
decrypt the connection string when it's needed by the application. I'll
paste some sample code for this below.
Charlie Nilsson [msft]
Visual Studio Update
'##################################################################
' Sample encryption code in VB
'##################################################################
Imports System
Imports System.IO
Imports System.Security.Cryptography
Imports System.Text
Public Class MyCryptoClass
'private key - enter random numbers here
Private Shared key() As Byte = {12, 52, 53, 124, 33, 36, 77, 48, 29, 50,
111, 112, 213, 14, 135, 116, 167, 198, 109, 200, 211, 29, 33, 35}
'init vector
Private Shared iv() As Byte = {12, 125, 37, 140, 65, 56, 76, 18, 99, 107,
122, 123, 153, 114, 159, 196, 179, 198, 192, 220, 212, 123, 33, 54}
'##################################################################
' Encrypt
' - Encrypts a plaintext string
'##################################################################
Public Shared Function Encrypt(ByVal plainText As String) As String
Dim cryptoProvider As TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider = New
TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider
Dim ms As MemoryStream = New MemoryStream
Dim cs As CryptoStream = New CryptoStream(ms,
cryptoProvider.CreateEncryptor(key, iv), CryptoStreamMode.Write)
Dim sw As StreamWriter = New StreamWriter(cs)
sw.Write(plainText)
sw.Flush()
cs.FlushFinalBlock()
ms.Flush()
'convert back to a string
Return Convert.ToBase64String(ms.GetBuffer(), 0, ms.Length)
End Function
'##################################################################
' Decrypt
' - Decrypts a plaintext string
'##################################################################
Public Shared Function Decrypt(ByVal encodedText As String) As String
Dim cryptoProvider As TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider = New
TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider
'convert from string to byte array
Dim buffer As Byte() = Convert.FromBase64String(encodedText)
Dim ms As MemoryStream = New MemoryStream(buffer)
Dim cs As CryptoStream = New CryptoStream(ms,
cryptoProvider.CreateDecryptor(key, iv), CryptoStreamMode.Read)
Dim sr As StreamReader = New StreamReader(cs)
Return sr.ReadToEnd()
End Function
End Class
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Use of included script samples are subject to the terms specified at
http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm
Note: For the benefit of the community-at-large, all responses to this
message are best directed to the newsgroup/thread from which they
originated.
--------------------
Reply-To: "Chris Fink" <
[email protected]>
From: "Chris Fink" <
[email protected]>
Subject: Web.config
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 11:55:43 -0400
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Should the web.config file be included in my deployment, IE physically
located in the web app's virtual directory on a release? It makes me
nervous having my DB conn string, etc in a ASCII file so available. I am
hoping the answer is "it gets compiled, and is placed in the
\bin\myproject.dll file"
Chris
