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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T22:38:58+00:00

I’m developing a simple iPhone app where users register, and sign in with their

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I’m developing a simple iPhone app where users register, and sign in with their email/password. These values are stored in a remote database.

I’m using Cloudant to store this information (CouchDB is great), and have granted read-only privileges to a new user (created API key/pass). In order to communicate with Cloudant, you obviously need a URL to access it (eg https://user:pass@db.cloudant.com), which is stored in the app as a string.

Now, while I know this is pretty unsafe, I can’t think of any other alternatives in order to keep the db URL safe (specifically the username/password for it). I’ve seen people talk about using another server to proxy through to obtain the credentials, but it seems a little awkward.

Any help or thoughts would be really appreciated!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Are you trying to make a connection from your iPhone app directly to the database? You shouldn’t give your app read access to the whole remote user table / database. Sooner or later someone would find out and would have read access to your data. No matter how you try to obfuscate it, the user/password combination would need to be stored somehow in your app.

    What you should do is build a web service that connects to your DB and verifies your users. The database password stays on a server. This proxy-approach is not awkward, it is the only way to keep your database logins away from your users.

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