IV Property
[This documentation is for preview only, and is subject to change in later releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]
Gets or sets the initialization vector (IV) for the symmetric algorithm.
Namespace: System.Security.Cryptography
Assembly: System.Security (in System.Security.dll)
Syntax
'Declaration
Public Overridable Property IV As Byte()
public virtual byte[] IV { get; set; }
public:
virtual property array<unsigned char>^ IV {
array<unsigned char>^ get ();
void set (array<unsigned char>^ value);
}
abstract IV : byte[] with get, set
override IV : byte[] with get, set
function get IV () : byte[]
function set IV (value : byte[])
Property Value
Type: array<System. . :: . .Byte> [] () [] []
The initialization vector.
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.
.NET Framework Security
- Full trust for the immediate caller. This member cannot be used by partially trusted code. For more information, see dd66cd4c-b087-415f-9c3e-94e3a1835f74.