Keychain Unlocked: Mastering Advanced Security for Smarter, Safer Apps

Keychain, a framework used to store sensitive data securely, has an interesting place in the Apple Developer’s toolchain. Pretty much everyone has worked with it, it’s used literally in every app, yet not many developers interact with it’s API directly. Because the Keychain's API, while being flexible, is often considered low-level, developers often use third-party libraries or wrappers to bridge the gap and present it's API in a simpler way. As a result, most developers become unaware of the full potential of the framework and might be reluctant to implement custom data storage and retrieval mechanisms associated with it. This talk will shine the light on the intricacies of the Keychain by building one of those „Keychain Wrappers“ from scratch and gradually adding support for extra functionality, such as the biometric authentication, sharing data across multiple apps and storing multiple data types. Later, we’ll focus on creating custom authentication flows to improve user experience, for example, by not showing a biometric authentication prompt every time the user would like to access the data.