Is Portable.BouncyCastle cross-platform?

Question

Will Portable.BouncyCastle works on Linux & MacOS if I reference it from an ASP.NET Core 2 web application? Will my ASP.NET Core 2 app still be cross-platform compatible?

Answer 1

No it is not cross-platform. It uses some types like System.Security.Cryptography.CspParameters that are only implemented in .Net Core for Windows. See https://github.com/novotnyllc/bc-csharp/issues/6

Indeed, as of 2022-03-10, Portable.BouncyCastle still uses the RSACryptoServiceProvider(CspParameters) constructor, and .Net Core still has it stubbed out for non-Windows.

Just because something targets .Net Standard doesn't mean it works on non-Windows OSes. There are many .Net Core implementations of .Net Standard API that are just stubs which throw "not implemented on this platform" exceptions.