What seems like ages ago I spoke at WINETA about Agile Development in the .NET world. When Larry Clarkin made a point of saying that two-time WINETA speakers were a rare-breed indeed I resolved to join that small circle. A while back I had asked the wineta president if I could speak about digital cryptography.

Digital cryptography is near and dear to my heart because its one of the things that got me into .NET. I was writing some client apps that needed to exchange RSA and RC2 key data with some XML web services written in C#. When helping someone debug an issue I sometimes get to the point where I say "Let me drive", meaning I'd like to man the keybaord. I had not gotten down and dirty with an MSFT tool since writing a little OpenGL in Visual C++ 6. Ten minutes with C# and Visual Studio was all it took for me to know this was a better way to go.

At any rate, after this project I did a decent amount of work researching cryptography and learning a little more about the under the hood stuff than you can learn just by looking at API documentation. I now have some experience with algorithms and some of the subtleties of crypto (who knew character encoding would be the #1 things that trip people up?) that comes in handy from time to time, even very recently at work.

At any rate, I intend to cover the the "basics" of a very complex subject:

• Brief history of crypto
• Bit twiddling examples
• Overview of algorithms
• Overview of algorithm styles (ECB vs CBC vs CBF)
• ... all with plent of .net code examples
• WEP key cracker and examples of some crypto attacks, if I have time