Generating compatible encryption keys in PHP/.Net

This has come up several times, so here is the lowdown. You may be confused why your 2 identical strings generate different key bytes in PHP and .Net. The answer lies in the encoding. In both platforms, a string is a collection of characters.

• PHP characters are ASCII encoded, with a length of 7 bits.


• .Net characters are UTF-16, 1 or more sets of 16-bit words.

If you want your strings to generate the same bytecode, you need to do some encoding. In this example, I want to make a 24 byte key that is the md5 of some plain text.

Example:

PHP:


.Net