TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider.IV Property

Definition

Namespace:

System.Security.Cryptography

Assembly:

System.Security.Cryptography.dll

Source:

TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider.Wrap.cs

Gets or sets the initialization vector (IV) for the symmetric algorithm.

public:
 virtual property cli::array <System::Byte> ^ IV { cli::array <System::Byte> ^ get(); void set(cli::array <System::Byte> ^ value); };

public override byte[] IV { get; set; }

member this.IV : byte[] with get, set

Public Overrides Property IV As Byte()

Property Value

Byte[]

The initialization vector.

Exceptions

ArgumentNullException

An attempt was made to set the initialization vector to null.

CryptographicException

An attempt was made to set the initialization vector to an invalid size.

Remarks

The IV property is automatically set to a new random value whenever you create a new instance of one of the SymmetricAlgorithm classes or when you manually call the GenerateIV method. The size of the IV property must be the same as the BlockSize property divided by 8.

The classes that derive from the SymmetricAlgorithm class use a chaining mode called cipher block chaining (CBC), which requires a key and an initialization vector to perform cryptographic transformations on data. To decrypt data that was encrypted using one of the SymmetricAlgorithm classes, you must set the Key property and IV property to the same values that were used for encryption.

For a given secret key k, a simple block cipher that does not use an initialization vector will encrypt the same input block of plain text into the same output block of cipher text. If you have duplicate blocks within your plain text stream, you will have duplicate blocks within your cipher text stream. If unauthorized users know anything about the structure of a block of your plain text, they can use that information to decipher the known cipher text block and possibly recover your key. To combat this problem, information from the previous block is mixed into the process of encrypting the next block. Thus, the output of two identical plain text blocks is different. Because this technique uses the previous block to encrypt the next block, an initialization vector is needed to encrypt the first block of data.