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
leastprivilege.com 