AES Encryption for an NSString on the iPhone

Question

Can anybody point me in the right direction to be able to encrypt a string, returning another string with the encrypted data? (I\'ve been trying with AES256 encryption.) I w

Answer 1

I waited a bit on @QuinnTaylor to update his answer, but since he didn't, here's the answer a bit more clearly and in a way that it will load on XCode7 (and perhaps greater). I used this in a Cocoa application, but it likely will work okay with an iOS application as well. Has no ARC errors.

Paste before any @implementation section in your AppDelegate.m or AppDelegate.mm file.

#import 

@implementation NSData (AES256)

- (NSData *)AES256EncryptWithKey:(NSString *)key {
    // 'key' should be 32 bytes for AES256, will be null-padded otherwise
    char keyPtr[kCCKeySizeAES256+1]; // room for terminator (unused)
    bzero(keyPtr, sizeof(keyPtr)); // fill with zeroes (for padding)

    // fetch key data
    [key getCString:keyPtr maxLength:sizeof(keyPtr) encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

    NSUInteger dataLength = [self length];

    //See the doc: For block ciphers, the output size will always be less than or 
    //equal to the input size plus the size of one block.
    //That's why we need to add the size of one block here
    size_t bufferSize = dataLength + kCCBlockSizeAES128;
    void *buffer = malloc(bufferSize);

    size_t numBytesEncrypted = 0;
    CCCryptorStatus cryptStatus = CCCrypt(kCCEncrypt, kCCAlgorithmAES128, kCCOptionPKCS7Padding,
                                     keyPtr, kCCKeySizeAES256,
                                     NULL /* initialization vector (optional) */,
                                     [self bytes], dataLength, /* input */
                                     buffer, bufferSize, /* output */
                                     &numBytesEncrypted);
    if (cryptStatus == kCCSuccess) {
        //the returned NSData takes ownership of the buffer and will free it on deallocation
        return [NSData dataWithBytesNoCopy:buffer length:numBytesEncrypted];
    }

    free(buffer); //free the buffer;
    return nil;
}

- (NSData *)AES256DecryptWithKey:(NSString *)key {
    // 'key' should be 32 bytes for AES256, will be null-padded otherwise
    char keyPtr[kCCKeySizeAES256+1]; // room for terminator (unused)
    bzero(keyPtr, sizeof(keyPtr)); // fill with zeroes (for padding)

    // fetch key data
    [key getCString:keyPtr maxLength:sizeof(keyPtr) encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

    NSUInteger dataLength = [self length];

    //See the doc: For block ciphers, the output size will always be less than or 
    //equal to the input size plus the size of one block.
    //That's why we need to add the size of one block here
    size_t bufferSize = dataLength + kCCBlockSizeAES128;
    void *buffer = malloc(bufferSize);

    size_t numBytesDecrypted = 0;
    CCCryptorStatus cryptStatus = CCCrypt(kCCDecrypt, kCCAlgorithmAES128, kCCOptionPKCS7Padding,
                                     keyPtr, kCCKeySizeAES256,
                                     NULL /* initialization vector (optional) */,
                                     [self bytes], dataLength, /* input */
                                     buffer, bufferSize, /* output */
                                     &numBytesDecrypted);

    if (cryptStatus == kCCSuccess) {
        //the returned NSData takes ownership of the buffer and will free it on deallocation
        return [NSData dataWithBytesNoCopy:buffer length:numBytesDecrypted];
    }

    free(buffer); //free the buffer;
    return nil;
}

@end

Paste these two functions in the @implementation class you desire. In my case, I chose @implementation AppDelegate in my AppDelegate.mm or AppDelegate.m file.

- (NSString *) encryptString:(NSString*)plaintext withKey:(NSString*)key {
    NSData *data = [[plaintext dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] AES256EncryptWithKey:key];
    return [data base64EncodedStringWithOptions:kNilOptions];
}

- (NSString *) decryptString:(NSString *)ciphertext withKey:(NSString*)key {
    NSData *data = [[NSData alloc] initWithBase64EncodedString:ciphertext options:kNilOptions];
    return [[NSString alloc] initWithData:[data AES256DecryptWithKey:key] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
}