Question

I am working on an application which has got some sensitive information. I am aware that it would be difficult for a layman to hack into iphone to get the information. If I use SQLite directly I have something called SQLite Cipher to encrypt / encode the database.

Is there anyway where I can have the same way of encrypting the coredata so it makes it hard for hackers to get into the data.

Can someone shed some light on this?

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

The Core Data Programming Guide says explicitly that the SQL store type is a little more secure than XML or binary, but is not inherently secure – it recommends an encrypted disk image. Unfortunately, that’s a little hard to manage on the iPhone.

What you might consider, if this is a real concern for you, is to build your own persistent store type – the Guide has a section on creating your own atomic store, and refers you to the Atomic Store Programming Topics document. Build a store that takes some key from a user prompt at startup, then initializes with that key for encryption and decryption purposes. (Note that if you take this route, the NSPersistentStore class reference says that subclassing NSPersistentStore directly is not supported in Core Data – you should subclass NSAtomicStore instead.)