It was 1998 and I developed a C++ project for our customer. At this time crypting algorithems hadn’t been a part of the programming language and therefore must be implemented by the developer himself. Another way was to spent lot of money to buy a library.
That was the time I found the AraCrypt algorithm from Darroll Walsh at www.codeproject.com. I was very impressed about the simplicity of this algorithem.
It only had one deficit, that was that a crypted string could contain /0 which was not very useful when working with null terminated strings … (That’s a thing I changed on AraCrypt.)
The use case I needed the AraCrypt algorithm was storing values in Ini Files, Registry and XML – you can say, I always used it to store configuration data. That’s why I added a conversion from binary to hex string and back, that was even more user-friendly.
… The project changed, but the good experience persists …
I must admit that I really missed that wonderful crypting algorithm. That’s why I decided to rewrite it for other programming languages. First for Visual Basic 6, after that PHP and than C#. I really ported it to every language I used in the following years.
As an example here’s the link for the PHP example: AraCrypt PHP
If I could arouse interest in you, you can download the AraCrypt porting for VB6, PHP and C# using the following link.
Download the AraCrypt portings.
