MachineKey.Protect and MachineKey.Unprotect

Question

I'm using .net 4.5 and MachineKey.Protect/MachineKey.Unprotect for encrypting and decrypting values. I'm wondering when we deploy the code to production where we'll have multiple servers, does the MachineKey.Protect/MachineKey.Unprotect works properly without synchronizing machine keys?

Here is the sample code for decrypt:

var bytes = Convert.FromBase64String(Token);
var decryValue = MachineKey.Unprotect(bytes, Purpose);
string plainText = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(decryValue);

Let me know your thoughts!

Answer 1

To unprotect data you'll need the same machine key that the one used to protect data. So if you need to unprotect data protected by another server, your servers must share the same machine key.