Using the Win32 Cryptographic API to Hash Data

The Microsoft Win32 subsytem has had cryptographic support since Windows NT4.0 in the form of APIs that were exported by CryptoAPI. However, CryptoAPI has been deprecated, and was superseded by Cryptography API: Next Generation (CNG) which has been the long term supported cryptography API. Its extensibility and algorithm agnostic interface makes it easy to use at the application level. It also makes it easier for Microsoft to implement new algorithms. In this article, I show how a programmer can wrap that API for the purpose of hashing data.