Saving Email/Password to Keychain in iOS

Posted by Jason on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Jason
Published on 2011-03-09T15:20:50Z Indexed on 2012/10/03 9:37 UTC
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I'm very new to iOS development so forgive me if this is a newbie question. I have a simple authentication mechanism for my app that takes a user's email address and password. I also have a switch that says 'Remember me'. If the user toggles that switch on, I'd like to preserve their email/password so those fields can be auto-populated in the future.

I've gotten this to work with saving to a plist file but I know that's not the best idea since the password is unencrypted. I found some sample code for saving to the keychain, but to be honest, I'm a little lost. For the function below, I'm not sure how to call it and how to modify it to save the email address as well.

I'm guessing to call it would be: saveString(@"passwordgoeshere");

Thank you for any help!!!

+ (void)saveString:(NSString *)inputString forKey:(NSString *)account {

    NSAssert(account != nil, @"Invalid account");
    NSAssert(inputString != nil, @"Invalid string");

    NSMutableDictionary *query = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];

    [query setObject:(id)kSecClassGenericPassword forKey:(id)kSecClass];
    [query setObject:account forKey:(id)kSecAttrAccount];
    [query setObject:(id)kSecAttrAccessibleWhenUnlocked forKey:(id)kSecAttrAccessible];

    OSStatus error = SecItemCopyMatching((CFDictionaryRef)query, NULL);
    if (error == errSecSuccess) {
        // do update
        NSDictionary *attributesToUpdate = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:[inputString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] 
                                                                      forKey:(id)kSecValueData];

        error = SecItemUpdate((CFDictionaryRef)query, (CFDictionaryRef)attributesToUpdate);
        NSAssert1(error == errSecSuccess, @"SecItemUpdate failed: %d", error);
    } else if (error == errSecItemNotFound) {
        // do add
        [query setObject:[inputString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] forKey:(id)kSecValueData];

        error = SecItemAdd((CFDictionaryRef)query, NULL);
        NSAssert1(error == errSecSuccess, @"SecItemAdd failed: %d", error);
    } else {
        NSAssert1(NO, @"SecItemCopyMatching failed: %d", error);
    }
}

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