Biztalk and encryption

Lately I've had the opportunity to do some Biztalk 2010 development, and amongst other things, creating an integration that needed PGP encoding.

For various reasons I chose to go with this one:

http://bajwork.blogspot.com/2007/08/pgp-pipeline-component-v11.html

It is pretty straight forward to use and relies on Bouncy Castle for the actual encryption.

However, after a while I discovered that it appeared to mess with some characters in the encrypted, namely our swedish å, ä and ö. But only when I tried to encrypt something else than UTF-8, which worked flawlessly. Also, if I MIME-encoded the message before encrypting it, it was also unaffected.

I've had very little contact with PGP previously, so I didn't really know where to start. Was this maybe some kind of PGP limitation? However, after a night of encrypting files of different formats and encodings, and trying other PGP software I realized that it must be this particular PGP component that's doing something wrong.

And it did, sort of. Before encrypting, it creates a temporary file so that it has something to encrypt. It turns out that this file was always created using the .Net default encoding (which is UTF-8). With Biztalk, you propably get pretty far with supporting just UTF-8 but if I have a windows-1252 file and writes it to disk as an UTF-8 file, the 7-bit ascii characters will look fine but anything from the extended area (>127) is lost.

I solved this problem by adding a new property to the component for TempFileEncoding.

However, there's a decrypt section which I havent really looked at yet, but I imagine the decrypted file is written as a binary file anyway which will preserve whatever encoding it may have.