Apple opens its cryptographic library to developers

Apple has opened up its security framework, common crypto libraries, and the corecrypto library for both iOS and OS X to third parties. The manufacturer says opening up helps developers build in advanced security features.

The security framework contains the services and APIs for, among other things, reading and validating certificates, managing Keychain items and random number generators. The common crypto library also contains APIs for symmetric and asymmetric encryption and hashing purposes.

Both the framework and the libraries use the underlying ‘corecrypto’. This is a low-level library that applications should not address directly, but which Apple nevertheless releases for verification and assessment of proper functioning.

Not all information from the corecrypto library is equally useful for making applications more secure. The library contains not only routines for standards such as aes, rsa, Curve25519 and sha256, but also implementations of obsolete techniques such as md2, md4, md5, des, rc2, and rc4.

Earlier this year, Apple released the source code for its programming language Swift.