Using data protection

ASP.NET Core uses data protection providers to protect data that is exposed to third parties, such as cookies. The IDataProtectionProvider interface defines its contract and ASP.NET Core ships with a default instance registered in the DI framework of KeyRingBasedDataProtector, as illustrated in the following code snippet:

services.AddDataProtection();

The data protection provider is used by the cookies' authentication and also the cookie temp data provider APIs. A data protection provider exposes a method, CreateProtector, that is used to retrieve a protector instance, which can then be used to protect a string, as illustrated in the following code snippet:

var protector = provider.CreateProtector("MasteringAspNetCore");
var input = "Hello, World";
var output = protector.Protect(input); //CfDJ8AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...uGoxWLjGKtm1SkNACQ

You can certainly use it for other purposes, but for the two presented...