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While attempting to quit smoking and after spending a full day trying to understand why the previous devs took this approach to encrypting a string and my lack of nicotine addled brain not allowing me to see that this was a “Secure”String and so uses a machine specific key (that’s why the code that worked locally wouldn’t run on production 😑) this is my rant on comments added to the helper I had to write
/// <summary>
/// If you are using this class and it's not for backward compatibility - then you probably shouldn't be using it
/// Nothing good comes from "Secure" strings
/// Further to this Secure strings are only "useful" for single user crypto as the encryption uses the login creds, transferring
/// this data to another client will result in them never being able to decrypt it
///
/// Windows uses the user's login password to generate a master key.
/// This master key is protected using the user's password and then stored along with the user's profile.
/// This master key then gets used to derive a number of other keys and it's these other keys that are used to protect the data.
///
/// This is also a broken crypto method via injection (see Hawkeye http://hawkeye.codeplex.com/) plus the string is stored in plain
/// text in memory, along with numerous other reasons not to use it.
/// </summary>
public class SecureStringHelper
{
rant