If you need to be able to send messages back and forth between two or more people or computers, and you want the other party to be able to read the data, but no one else, then encryption is the way to go! Encryption algorithms allow you to disguise the data in such a way that it is mathematically improbable for anyone other than the intended person to be able to decipher it. However, you can give the people you want to read the data a certain "key" that will be able to decrypt the data so that it is readable again. There are several encryption/decryption algorithms available in the .NET Framework for you to use. This article focuses on symmetric algorithms, and they are: