VBCorLib for VB6

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Encryption Made Easy

Well, it is a joy to perform encryption in VB6 now. Using encryption classes in VB6 that work the same as the DotNET counterpart makes things much easier.

I have seen many other VB6 encryption classes, but they seem cumbersome and restrictive. While using their classes, I have to perform the entire encryption operation in one shot. The entire array or a file at once. I can't piece it together. And usually I have to pad my own data. Not to mention that everything else pretty much only supports ECB feedback.

When using the VBCorLib versions, I can swap out different algorithms without needing to change anything. There are only 4 algorithms built into the library. I'm thinking of implementing a few others, but make them external classes that depend on VBCorLib. Probably Blowfish and a couple others. This would show how to build cipher routines external to the library, yet leverage the full capability of the algorithm by making it work with everything in VBCorLib, especially the CryptoStream class. Hmmmmm I'll have to think about this one...

Kelly