Encrypting Web.Config Values Overview: One of the most common uses of the protected configuration is to encrypt connection strings in web.confg (that's one of the reasons for creating a separate tag for connection strings instead of adding it in appSettings tag). Adding this connection string as plain text is not the best practice for sharepoint web application security and this might cause serious hacking problems. Sharepoint also support for encrypting and decrypting configuration sections in web.config file. In this article, we will explore how to encrypt and decrypt sections of the web.config. We can encrypt the configuration sections by using two built-in providers: DPAPI (Windows Data Protection API) Provider or the RSA provider . The RSA provider (default) uses an RSA key which holds public and private keys, where as the DPAPI provider uses built-in machine-specific key. Let us explore the steps required to encrypt the sections using RSA. Below are steps in detail. Step 1...