Cross Platform Development | // ThomasWeller

A Secure Password Hashing Implementation for PCLs

19/04/2015 / thomas-weller / 1 Comment

Almost every software has to deal with some kind of user/identity management – be it desktop applications that usually should integrate with the operating system’s and/or business environment’s identity and authentication concepts or be it cloud based/mobile applications or web services that need to be able to control access on their own behalf.

The issue will even become more important in the near future, because the number of mobile users grows at a high rate, and at the same time we can read almost every day about stolen passwords and hacked websites. Also, the activities of Intelligence services around the world don’t really make one feel more secure…

So, with mobile application development and cross-platform compatibility in mind, I fired up my favorite search engine and was looking for a password hashing implementation that met the following requirements:

PCL – compatible
Easy to use
And, of course, being cryptographically as secure as possible

To my surprise, I found nothing that met all the above requirements and was usable out of the box. What I did find were various different components, that had to be re-combined into a new class (called PasswordHash).

Xamarin.Forms FormsGallery in XAML

This is a complete rework of the Xamarin.Forms FormsGallery sample, but this time using the XAML markup language instead of creating the UI elements directly in code as it is done in the original sample. The purpose of this sample is to showcase everything that’s available out of the box in Xamarin.Forms, or, in Xamarin’s own words:

This program displays all the views, cells, layouts, and pages available in Xamarin.Forms, one per page.

I did this as an exercise for becoming familiar with Xamarin.Forms and at the same time as a reference application to be able to quickly look up how Xamarin.Forms standard controls are used in XAML.