How to safely store encryption key in a .NET assembly

Posted by Alex on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Alex
Published on 2010-03-27T06:47:08Z Indexed on 2010/03/27 6:53 UTC
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Filed under:

.NET

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compact-framework

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key-storage

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encryption

In order to prevent somebody from grabbing my data easily, I cache data from my service as encrypted files (copy protection, basically). However, in order to do this, I must store the encryption key within the .NET assembly so it is able to encrypt and decrypt these files. Being aware of tools like Red Gate's .NET Reflector which can pull my key right out, I get a feeling that this is not a very safe way of doing it... are there any best practices to doing this?

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