Re: passing encrypted data from .net to RPG

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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?