encryption

Windows Phone Dev Center now automatically encrypts all apps to prevent piracy

Developers

By Rich Edmonds, Friday, Aug 10, 2012 at 7:10 pm

Software piracy is a serious battle, which can also affect our beloved platform developers. Microsoft has taken action by automatically applying encryption to all apps through the newly unveiled Dev Center. According to a detailed post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog, Todd Brix states that all apps (including those already submitted) are automatically encrypted without user input.

We first heard about the possibility of server-side encryption back in November, 2011. From our understanding, Microsoft was waiting until everyone was on Mango to implement that feature and it now looks to have happened. If you recall, at the end of April Microsoft decreed that you had to have Windows Phone 7.5 to get to the Marketplace. Combined with the Dev Center refresh, we think that transition for encryption is now complete.

Looking at encryption in Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone News

By Daniel Rubino, Friday, Jul 2, 2010 at 5:53 pm

Though Windows Phone 7 is primarily aimed at consumers during the initial launch, Microsoft already has a strong focus on enterprise built within the the OS (Office, Sharepoint, Skydrive, remote management, etc.). This enterprise focus will no doubt become even more robust during further revisions to the OS, hopefully giving Microsoft that edge once again over RIM.

One area that is of interest would be security and encryption. Turns out WP7 supports quite a few forms of data protection algorithms, including the following:

AES
HMACSHA1
HMACSHA256
Rfc2898DeriveBytes
SHA1
SHA256

This doesn't mean that encryption is directly supported out-of-the-box for end users, but it does mean that developers have a wide assortment of tools to handle data encryption when writing their own software for the platform. Rob Tiffiany demonstrates this by writing an app to encode some simple data on the fly. His impression is that WP7 has a very solid base for security, which to bring it around again, is not only is good for business but for corporate environments.

Review: KeePass PPC

By George Ponder, Thursday, Feb 5, 2009 at 10:06 pm

In keeping with our theme of looking at open-source software for Windows Mobile, we now focus on KeePass PPC. KeePass is similar to other open source projects in that it originally was intended for desktop operating systems and has since been ported to handheld platforms.

Similar to several applications that are commercially available, KeePass stores sensitive information such as usernames and passwords or bank account numbers. The concept is great: The portability of your Windows Mobile device paired with the data security offered by some of the most secure encryption algorithms publicly available.

Keep reading for more.