Symmetric Encryption (AES): Is saving the IV and Salt alongside the encrypted data safe and proper?

Question

I am trying to make sense of how to handle and manage an initilization vector and salt (when applicable) when encrypting and decrypting data using a symmetric encryption alg

Answer 1

Yes, both the IV and salt are public values. What's more important is ensuring these are random values for each encryption operation.

To give an example of this in the wild, take a look at the rncryptor data format. Here the salt and IV are packaged into a data format, along with the ciphertext and a MAC value. (Note: this is an objective-c example).