IPhone app with SSL client certs

user_247471 0
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I'm building an iphone app that needs to access a web service over https using client certificates. If I put the client cert (in pkcs12 format) in the app bundle, I'm able to load it into the app and make the https call (largely thanks to stackoverflow.com).

However, I need a way to distribute the app without any certs and leave it to the user to provide his own certificate. I thought I would just do that by instructing the user to import the certificate in iphone's profiles (settings->general->profiles), which is what you get by opening a .p12 file in Mail.app and then I would access that item in my app. I would expect that the certificates in profiles are available through the keychain API, but I guess I'm wrong on that.

1) Is there a way to access a certificate that I've already loaded in iphone's profile in my app?

2) What other options I have for loading a user specified certificate in my app? The only thing I can come up with is providing some interface where the user can give an URL to his .p12 cerificate, which I can then load into the app's keychain for later use, but thats not exactly user-friednly. I'm looking for something that would allow the user to put the cert on phone (email it to himself) and then load it in my app.

keychain objective-c ssl-certificate iphone
7 Answers

I've tried with this: 

NSString *thePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"certificate" ofType:@"p12"]; 
NSData *PKCS12Data = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:thePath]; 
CFDataRef inPKCS12Data = (CFDataRef)PKCS12Data; 
CFStringRef password = CFSTR("pass"); 
const void *keys[] = { kSecImportExportPassphrase }; 
const void *values[] = { password }; 
CFDictionaryRef optionsDictionary = CFDictionaryCreate(NULL, keys, values, 1, NULL, NULL); 
CFArrayRef items = CFArrayCreate(NULL, 0, 0, NULL); 
SecPKCS12Import(inPKCS12Data, optionsDictionary, &items);

inPKCS12Data is correct but items is empty. What is happening?

user_2567380

If a .p12 file isn't too big you could encode it using Base64 and then embed a link in an email with a custom url scheme, e.g.:

myapp://certificate/<base 64 data>

User clicks the link, your app saves the certificate somewhere for future use. Just make sure that Mail.app on the iPhone won't mangle the email.

user_2439410
user_890050
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