amitvaghela/cocoapods-keys

A key value store for securely storing environment and application keys

A key value store for enviroment and application keys.

Its good security practice to keep production keys out of developer hands. CocoaPods-keys makes it easy to have per-user config settings stored securely in the developer's keychain, and not in the application source. It is a plugin that once installed will run on every pod install or pod update.

Requirements

Requires CocoaPods 0.34, which is currently unreleased.

Installation

$ gem install cocoapods-keys

How it works

Keys names are stored in ~/cocoapods/keys/ and key values in the OS X keychain. When you run pod install or pod update, an Objective-C class is created with scrambled versions of the keys, making it difficult to just dump the contents of the decrypted binary and extract the keys. At runtime, the keys are unscrambled for use in your app.

The generated Objective-C classes are stored in the Pods/Keys directory, so if you're checking in your Pods folder, just add Pods/Keys to your .gitignore file.

Usage

You can save keys on a per-project basis by running the command:

$ pod keys set KEY VALUE

You can list all known keys by running:

$ pod keys

For example:

  $ cd MyApplication
  $ pod keys set "NetworkAPIToken" "AH2ZMiraGQbyUd9GkNTNfWEdxlwXcmHciEOH"
  Saved NetworkAPIToken to MyApplication.

  $ pod keys set "AnalyticsToken" "6TYKGVCn7sBSBFpwfSUCclzDoSBtEXw7"
  Saved AnalyticsToken to MyApplication.

  $ pod keys
  Keys for MyApplication
   ├  NetworkAPIToken - AH2ZMiraGQbyUd9GkNTNfWEdxlwXcmHciEOH
   └  AnalyticsToken - 6TYKGVCn7sBSBFpwfSUCclzDoSBtEXw7

  GIFs - /Users/orta/dev/mac/GIFs
   └ redditAPIToken & mixpanelAPIToken

After the next pod install or pod update keys will add a new Objective-C class to your Pods xcworkspace. This provides an API to your keys from Cocoa code. For example the application code above would look like:

#import "ORAppDelegate.h"
#import <CocoaPods-Keys/MyApplicationKeys.h>
#import <ARAnalytics/ARAnalytics.h>

@implementation ORAppDelegate

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification *)aNotification
{
    MyApplicationKeys *keys = [[MyApplicationKeys alloc] init];
    [ARAnalytics setupWithAnalytics:@{
        ARGoogleAnalyticsID : keys.analyticsToken;
    }];
}

@end

Security

Key security is difficult. Right now even the biggest apps get their keys leaked. This is neatly summed up by John Adams of the Twitter Security Team on Quora.

Putting this in the context of, "should you be storing keys in software", is more appropriate. Many companies do this. It's never a good idea.

When developers do that, other developers can use debuggers and string searching commands to extract those keys from the running application. There are numerous talks on how to do that, but leave that as an exercise to the reader to find those talks.

Many people believe that obfuscating these keys in code will help. It usually won't because you can just run a debugger and find the fully functional keys.

So in summary, the ideal way to store keys is to not store keys. In reality though most Apps embed keys, and this does that and adds some rudimentary obfuscation to the keys. A well motivated app cracker could probably extract this within a few minutes however.