I have a windows forms applciation that stores encrypted files to disk. At runtime, it decrypts those files and passes the resulting memorystreams to Datasets. I am using symmetric encryption with AESManaged.
There are custom functions to generate Key and IV byte arrays from a string. However I am currently hard coding the secure string that I use to generate Key and Iv, which I think defeats the purpose of encryption. I understand that the best way would be to prompt the user for a password and use that string. Is there any other way around this where I don't have to prompt the user for a password? Also I cannot use DPAPI because the encrypted data file is expected to be shared between users and computers.