Fixing hardcoded cryptographic keys

Cryptographic keys are an essential part of the whole ecosystem of cryptography. This string is vital for encrypting and decrypting sensitive data. In particular, asymmetric cryptographic algorithms have private keys (as part of the public-private key pair exchange) that are meant to be kept secure from prying eyes. If these secret keys fall into the wrong hands or get leaked, an attacker will be able to successfully perform sensitive data decryption.

Note

The topic of applied cryptography is wide and complex. This book briefly touched on weak cryptographic algorithms in this chapter, but for a more comprehensive understanding of how cryptography is implemented in .NET, please read .NET Cryptography Model from the official Microsoft online documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/security/cryptography-model.

The following recipe will help us find the security flaw in our code that would compromise these cryptographic...