Question

I am developing an application for iPhone on Snow Leopard with Xcode 3.1 that receives from a restful web service an encrypted text in hexadecimal format with the algorithm AES 128-bit (CBC). The algorithm uses an initialization vector + secret key. How do I decrypt this text? Thanks to everyone for the tips that I will succeed in giving.

EDIT:
I get response from REST Server in hex AND crypted format,I try with this code but i receive always bad param error. Can you help me to find the error?
Is it possible that i firstly convert the string response into binary format?

      NSString *response = [request responseString];

      NSData *encryptedData = [response dataUsingEncoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding];
      NSString *key  = @"32charlength";
      NSString *iv   = @"16charlength";  
      NSData *unencryptedData = NULL;
      size_t unencryptedLength = [unencryptedData length];
      CCCryptorStatus ccStatus = CCCrypt(kCCDecrypt, kCCAlgorithmAES128, 0, key, kCCKeySizeAES128, iv, [encryptedData bytes], [encryptedData length], unencryptedData, [encryptedData length], &unencryptedLength);     
      NSString *output = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:unencryptedData length:unencryptedLength encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

      if (ccStatus == kCCSuccess) risultato.text = @"SUCCESS";
      else if (ccStatus == kCCParamError) risultato.text =  @"BAD PARAM";
      else if (ccStatus == kCCBufferTooSmall) risultato.text =  @"BUFFER TOO SMALL";
      else if (ccStatus == kCCMemoryFailure) risultato.text =  @"MEMORY FAILURE";
      else if (ccStatus == kCCAlignmentError) risultato.text =  @"ALIGNMENT";
      else if (ccStatus == kCCDecodeError) risultato.text =  @"DECODE ERROR";
      else if (ccStatus == kCCUnimplemented)  risultato.text = @"UNIMPLEMENTED";

EDIT2:
this function return BAD PARAM because haven’t the right buffer size where allocate decrypted data. I edit the function in this working way:

      NSData *encryptedData = [response dataUsingEncoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding];
      const void *key  = @"32charlength;
      uint8_t *iv      = @"16charlength";  
      char buffer[4*4096]; 
      memset(buffer, '\0', sizeof(buffer));
              size_t size = sizeof(buffer);
      CCCryptorStatus ccStatus = CCCrypt(kCCDecrypt, 
                                         kCCAlgorithmAES128, 
                                         0, 
                                         key, 
                                         kCCKeySizeAES128, 
                                         iv, 
                                         [encryptedData bytes], 
                                         [encryptedData length], 
                                         buffer, 
                                         sizeof(buffer), 
                                         &size);

This function working for me.. thanks so much.

EDIT 23 MARCH——

Now the system work form me with 16 byte key size. Now i have a question, what i can do to implement 32 byte key size ? thanks so much.

Answer 1

This is possible using the CCCryptor functions included in the <CommonCrypto/CommonCryptor.h> header. Check man CCCryptor for the gory details, in your case it sounds like you can use a single call to CCCrypt() to decode the received data:

CCCryptorStatus
CCCrypt(CCOperation op, CCAlgorithm alg, CCOptions options, const void *key, size_t keyLength,
     const void *iv, const void *dataIn, size_t dataInLength, void *dataOut, size_t dataOutAvailable,
     size_t *dataOutMoved);

Assuming you have the data to be decrypted in NSData *encryptedData you could try something like:

char * key = "shouldbe16chars.";
NSUInteger dataLength = [encryptedData length];
uint8_t unencryptedData[dataLength + kCCKeySizeAES128];
size_t unencryptedLength;

CCCrypt(kCCDecrypt, kCCAlgorithmAES128, 0, key, kCCKeySizeAES128, NULL, [encryptedData bytes], dataLength, unencryptedData, dataLength, &unencryptedLength);
NSString *output = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:unencryptedData length:unencryptedLength encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

This is untested, make sure you check the return value of CCCrypt for errors. Check the header file for details, it is well documented.