this was a question on the MSDN Newsgroups.

By looking at the source with reflector – they create a HashTable with all available algorithm mappings (look at System.Security.Cryptography.CryptoConfig. CreateDefaultMappingHT).

The HT includes hashing and encryption algorithms.

Out of experimentation i found out that you can use the following strings for the PasswordDeriveBytes ctor:

• MD5
• SHA1
• SHA256
• SHA384
• SHA512
• HMACSHA1