How can I encrypt CoreData contents on an iPhone

I have some information I'd like to store statically encrypted on an iPhone application. I'm new to iPhone development, some I'm not terribly familiar with CoreData and how it integrates with the views. I have the data as JSON, though I can easily put it into a SQLITE3 database or any other backing data format. I'll take whatever is easiest (a) to encrypt and (b) to integrate with the iPhone view layer.

The user will need to enter the password to decrypt the data each time the app is launched. The purpose of the encryption is to keep the data from being accessible if the user loses the phone.

For speed reasons, I would prefer to encrypt and decrypt the entire file at once rather than encrypting each individual field in each row of the database.

Note: this isn't the same idea as Question 929744, in which the purpose is to keep the user from messing with or seeing the data. The data should be perfectly transparent when in use.

Also note: I'm willing to use SQLCipher to store the data, but would prefer to use things that already exist on the iPhone/CoreData framework rather than go through the lengthy build/integration process involved.

Solution 1:

You can encrypt individual properties in your Core Data model entities by making them transformable properties, then creating an NSValueTransformer subclass which will encrypt and decrypt the data for that property. While this is not the whole-database decryption that you're looking for, it will have a much lower memory footprint than decrypting an entire database into memory. Additionally, it will allow the decryption to be done lazily, rather than all up front, so your application will load much faster. Depending on the encryption used, I would even expect that the on-disk data accesses for loading each entity would be slower than the decryption process for the properties, so you won't see that much of a performance penalty when accessing the properties.

Transformable properties like this are very easy to use, because you read and write to them as normal, while the encryption / decryption goes on behind the scenes.

Solution 2:

Do you need to encrypt? Newer iPhones (3Gs, 4, iPad...) encrypt all data on the device. With a single, hashed, salted password on your app, no one can get to the data without a password. Data is sandboxed from all other apps.

Data Protection on iOS

Solution 3:

"The purpose of the encryption is to keep the data from being accessible if the user loses the phone."

iOS has had Data Protection since iOS 4, and Core Data has supported this for a long time. Data protection is designed for exactly the kinds of scenarios you are interested in. By default, Core Data NSSQLiteStoreType files have NSFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstUserAuthentication for applications built with the iOS 5 API or later. The WWDC 2012 session Protecting the User's Data goes into this topic in much more detail, and recommends using NSFileProtectionComplete. You can use this with Core Data by passing that value in the options dictionary used to open your Core Data NSSQLiteStoreType store.

Example:

NSDictionary *storeOptions = @{ NSPersistentStoreFileProtectionKey : NSFileProtectionComplete };
if (![coordinator addPersistentStoreWithType:NSSQLiteStoreType configuration:nil URL:[self storeURL] options:storeOptions error:&error]){

The broader topic of device security is covered in iOS Device Security