IPhone app with SSL client certs

Question

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

Answer 1

Apple does restrict the use of device-wide keys/certificates to it's own applications/services, such as WiFi, VPN, Mail, etc. Third-party applications are not able to use any of these keys/certs (without jailbreaking). However, applications are able to import, store, and use keys and certificates in a in-app keychain. In addition, you can share keys/certs across multiple applications with the keychain-access-group feature in iOS.

I recently published a blog post titled In-App Mobile Certificates Made Easy with mCMS, which may have helped you out. Our company is developing an API that makes it easy to support in-app certificates, obtained directly from your Microsoft-based PKI. Our solution also offers on-device key generation, instead of generating a P12 on another machine and trying to import it into your app.