Re: passing encrypted data from .net to RPG

Hi Mike,

Encrypted values are not typically text. This creates two problems:
a) Cookies are required to be text.
b) ASCII/EBCDIC translation will corrupt them.

You already guessed at (b), but perhaps you don't realize that (a) is a problem as well. A cookie is a text string. There are certain characters that are never allowed in a cookie, these include the CR and LF characters amongst other things. Even if you do no ASCII/EBCDIC translation, a pure 8-bit binary value (which is what cryptography routines always output) is not valid in a cookie.

There are tools that let you encode data in a binary-safe manner. base64 is probably the best one. After encrypting your data, base64 encode it. This will give you a value that's okay to put in a cookie.

Then, in the RPG program, base64 decode it. The result should be the exact same binary values. (It doesn't matter if the encoded data was converted from ASCII to EBCDIC -- the decode should still yield the exact same binary values.)

HTH

Mike Cunningham wrote:

We are working on a project where we need to use a .net application
to create and write a string into a browser cookie that has been
encrypted using tdes and then have an i5 RPG application retrieve
that cookie and decrypt the string back to its original values. Is
the translation from an ASCII system to an EBCDIC system going to
give us problems in this process? If so has anyone done this and
know what needs done to make it possible?