Introduction

The Azure Storage service manages the storage of blobs, queues, and tables. It is essential that this data be kept secure so that there is no unauthorized access to it. Each storage account has an account name and two access keys used to authenticate access to the storage service. The management of these access keys is important. The storage service provides two access keys for each storage account so that the access key not being used can be regenerated. We will see how to do this in the Managing the Azure Storage service recipe.

The storage service supports hash-based message authentication (HMAC), in which a storage operation request is hashed with the access key. On receiving the request, the storage service validates it and either accepts or denies it. The Azure Storage library provides several classes that support various ways of creating an HMAC and that hide the complexity of creating and using one. We will see how to use them in the Connecting to the Azure Storage service...