In Norse mythology, Heimdall is the gatekeeper of Bifröst, the rainbow road connecting Midgard, realm of the humans, to Asgard, the realm of gods.
In iOS, Heimdall serves as a gatekeeper between Security framework and the UI, offering a nice wrapper around the C APIs for encrypting, decrypting, signing and verifying messages.
Furthermore, Heimdall also helps maintain the public-private RSA key-pair in Keychain, allowing both creating as well as deleting the key pairs.
Heimdall requires Swift 3 and works with only Xcode 8 and above
Heimdall is available as a CocoaPod, simply add the following line to your Podfile
pod 'Heimdall', '~> 1.1.0'Also, make sure your podfile includes the following line, which is necessary to support Swift frameworks
use_frameworks!Simply include the following line in your Cartfile
github "henrinormak/Heimdall"
Note that Heimdall produces two frameworks in the Carthage build directory - Heimdall.framework and CommonCrypto.framework, you only need to include/embed Heimdall.framework into your project.
As Heimdall makes use of CommonCrypto and has it wrapped in a pseudo-module, the easiest way to use Heimdall is to include the entire project as a subproject in your workspace.
To do this, include Heimdall.xcodeproj (found in Heimdall folder) into your Xcode workspace. Then specify the Heimdall target as a Target Dependency for your main application target.
Finally, make sure Heimdall is listed under the Embedded Binaries section in Xcode
Although not recommended, you can also add Heimdall directly, by including Heimdall.swift in your project.
Using Heimdall is simple, for public-private key-pair, you just have to create an instance, which can be used for encryption/decryption, signing/verifying.
With this method you can locally encrypt data to be stored on disk or in a database, without putting everything in the Keychain.
if let heimdall = Heimdall(tagPrefix: "com.example") {
let testString = "This is a test string"
// Encryption/Decryption
if let encryptedString = heimdall.encrypt(testString) {
println(encryptedString) // "cQzaQCQLhAWqkDyPoHnPrpsVh..."
if let decryptedString = heimdall.decrypt(encryptedString) {
println(decryptedString) // "This is a test string"
}
}
// Signatures/Verification
if let signature = heimdall.sign(testString) {
println(signature) // "fMVOFj6SQ7h+cZTEXZxkpgaDsMrki..."
var verified = heimdall.verify(testString, signatureBase64: signature)
println(verified) // True
// If someone meddles with the message and the signature becomes invalid
verified = heimdall.verify(testString + "injected false message",
signatureBase64: signature)
println(verified) // False
}
}As RSA imposes a limit on the length of message that can be enrcypted, Heimdall uses a mix of AES and RSA to encrypt messages of arbitrary length. This is done in the following manner:
- A random AES key of suitable length is generated, the length is based on the size of the RSA key pair (either 128, 192 or 256 bits) *
- The message is encrypted with this AES key
- The key is encrypted with the public part of the RSA key pair (and padded to the correct block size) *
- The payload is built, containing the encrypted key, followed by the encrypted message. During decryption, the first block is always assumed to be the RSA encrypted AES key, this is why Heimdall can only decrypt messages encrypted by other Heimdall instances (or code that is compatible with Heimdall's logic) *
A more complex use case involves exchanging encrypted messages between multiple Heimdall instances, which can be situated on multiple different hosts.
First step is to share your public key with another party:
let localHeimdall = Heimdall(tagPrefix: "com.example")
if let heimdall = localHeimdall, publicKeyData = heimdall.publicKeyDataX509() {
var publicKeyString = publicKeyData.base64EncodedString()
// If you want to make this string URL safe,
// you have to remember to do the reverse on the other side later
publicKeyString = publicKeyString.replacingOccurrences(of: "/", with: "_")
publicKeyString = publicKeyString.replacingOccurrences(of: "+", with: "-")
println(publicKeyString) // Something along the lines of "MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA..."
// Data transmission of public key to the other party
}Second step, acting as the recipient (the one that wants to send the encrypted message), you receive the public key extracted and create a matching Heimdall instance:
// On other party, assuming keyData contains the received public key data
if let partnerHeimdall = Heimdall(publicTag: "com.example.partner", publicKeyData: keyData) {
// Transmit some message to the partner
let message = "This is a secret message to my partner"
let encryptedMessage = partnerHeimdall.encrypt(message)
// Transmit the encryptedMessage back to the origin of the public key
}Finally, having received the encrypted message, the party that sent out the public key can decrypt it using the original Heimdall instance they had:
// Initial host receives encryptedMessage
if let heimdall = localHeimdall {
if let decryptedMessage = heimdall.decrypt(encryptedMessage) {
println(decryptedMessage) // "This is a secret message to my partner"
}
}The workflow should be mirrored on all hosts, extracting their public keys and sharing those to all other parties. The public keys can be used to construct special Heimdall instances that are only able to encrypt messages and verify signatures.
Contributions to the codebase are very welcome, for ideas on what is needed, have a look through the open issues. In addition, any suggestions regarding the following topics are welcome:
- Security, interacting with the Keychain, making sure the results are kept securely etc.
- Tests, adding tests would also likely increase security
- Additional configurability, perhaps allowing non-permanent keys
- Error handling, currently most of the API simply returns
nils whenever an error occurs, this should be changed and proper error reporting should be implemented - Reducing the number of optionals in the public API of the Heimdall instances.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me. In case of bugs, create an issue here on GitHub
Henri Normak
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Copyright (c) 2015 Henri Normak
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