Miscellaneous ASP.NET Core Data Protection APIs

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[!WARNING] Types that implement any of the following interfaces should be thread-safe for multiple callers.

ISecret

The ISecret interface represents a secret value, such as cryptographic key material. It contains the following API surface:

• Length: int

• Dispose(): void

• WriteSecretIntoBuffer(ArraySegment<byte> buffer): void

The WriteSecretIntoBuffer method populates the supplied buffer with the raw secret value. The reason this API takes the buffer as a parameter rather than returning a byte[] directly is that this gives the caller the opportunity to pin the buffer object, limiting secret exposure to the managed garbage collector.

The Secret type is a concrete implementation of ISecret where the secret value is stored in in-process memory. On Windows platforms, the secret value is encrypted via CryptProtectMemory.