Prioritize user privacy and data security in your app. Discuss best practices for data handling, user consent, and security measures to protect user information.

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Debugging memory consumption in an Endpoint Security process
I have a launch daemon that's using the Endpoint Security framework which also is causing high memory usage (in Activity Monitor memory column shows for example 2GB and Real Memory 11MB) when building a big project in Xcode. Is it some kind of memory caching by the system? leaks -forkCorpse seems to not show any leaks. How can I attach with heap or Instruments without the process being killed with "ENDPOINTSECURITY, Code 2 EndpointSecurity client terminated because it failed to respond to a message before its deadline"?
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166
Mar ’25
How to update the lock icon and text on the initial unlock Screen with SFAutorizationPluginView.
Step1. Update system.login.screensaver authorizationdb rule to use “authenticate-session-owner-or-admin”( to get old SFAutorizationPluginView at Lock Screen ). Here I will use my custom authorization plugin. Step 2. Once the rule is in place, logout and login, now click on Apple icon and select “Lock Screen”. Is there a way programmatically to update the Lock Icon and the test getting displayed on the first Unlock screen? When I write a custom authorisation plug-in, I am getting control of the text fields and any consecutive screen I add from there on. But all I want is to update the lock icon and text fields on 1st unlock display itself. Can you please suggest how I can achieve this? Here is the screenshot with marked areas I am looking control for.
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145
Jun ’25
IDFA Not Resetting on App Reinstallation in iOS 26 Beta
Hello everyone, I've noticed some unusual behavior while debugging my application on the iOS 26 beta. My standard testing process relies on the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) authorization status being reset whenever I uninstall and reinstall my app. This is crucial for me to test the permission flow. However, on the current beta, I've observed the following: 1 I installed my app on a device running the iOS 26 beta for the first time. The ATTrackingManager.requestTrackingAuthorization dialog appeared as expected. 2 I completely uninstalled the application. 3 I then reinstalled the app. Unexpected Result: The tracking permission dialog did not appear. And more importantly, the device's advertisingIdentifier appears to have remained unchanged. This is highly unusual, as the IDFA is expected to be reset with a fresh app installation. My question: Is this an intentional change, and is there a fundamental shift in how the operating system handles the persistence of the IDFA or the authorization status? Or could this be a bug in the iOS 26 beta? Any information or confirmation on this behavior would be greatly appreciated.
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502
Sep ’25
iOS 18 - Intermittent keychain issue
Hi, We're encountering an intermittent issue where certain users are unexpectedly logged out of our app and unable to log in again. We believe we've narrrowed down the issue to the Keychain due to the following reasons: We use a keychain item to determine if the member is logged in or not. Failure to retrieve the value leads the app to believe the member is logged out. API error logs on the server show 3 missing values in fields that are each populated from items stored in the keychain. Additional Notes: The issue is hard to reproduce and seems to affect only a subset of users. In some cases, uninstalling and reinstalling the app temporarily resolves the problem, but the issue recurs after a period of time. The behavior appears to have coincided with the release of iOS 18. We’re using the “kSecAttrAccessibleWhenUnlocked” accessibility attribute. Given that our app doesn’t perform background operations, we wouldn’t expect this to be an issue. We’re also considering changing this to "kSecAttrAccessibleAfterFirstUnlockThisDeviceOnly" to see if this might resolve the issue. We're the keychain-swift library to interact with the keychain. We are currently adding extensive logging around our keychain implementation to confirm our findings but are looking for any additional input. Questions: Has anyone encountered similar keychain behavior on iOS 18? Are there known changes or stability issues with the keychain in iOS 18 that might lead to such intermittent “item not found” errors? Any recommended workarounds or troubleshooting steps that could help isolate the problem further? Thanks for any help you can provide.
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597
Feb ’25
iPad App Suggestions - Api Security
Hi , I have a requirement like, Develop an app for iPad and app uses .net core apis. App will be in kiosk mode, and app doesn't have any type of authentication even OTP also. As the apis will be publishing to all over internet, how can we achieve security to apis? Kindly provide suggestions for this implementation
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206
Sep ’25
How can my password manager app redirect users to the “AutoFill Passwords & Passkeys” settings page?
Hi all, I’m building a password manager app for iOS. The app implements an ASCredentialProviderExtension and has the entitlement com.apple.developer.authentication-services.autofill-credential-provider. From a UX perspective, I’d like to help users enable my app under: Settings → General → AutoFill & Passwords What I’ve observed: Calling UIApplication.openSettingsURLString only opens my app’s own Settings page, not the AutoFill list. Some apps (e.g. Google Authenticator) appear to redirect users directly into the AutoFill Passwords & Passkeys screen when you tap “Enable AutoFill.” 1Password goes even further: when you tap “Enable” in 1Password App, it shows a system pop-up, prompts for Face ID, and then enables 1Password as the AutoFill provider without the user ever leaving the app. Questions: Is there a public API or entitlement that allows apps to deep-link users directly to the AutoFill Passwords & Passkeys screen? Is there a supported API to programmatically request that my app be enabled as an AutoFill provider (similar to what 1Password seems to achieve)? If not, what is the recommended approach for guiding users through this flow? Thanks in advance!
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475
Aug ’25
Unit tests and persistent tokens
I'd like to implement unit tests that exercise keys made available via a persistent token interface. However, when attempting to list available tokens by passing kSecAttrAccessGroupToken as the kSecAttrAccessGroup to SecItemCopyMatching from a unit test, -34018 is returned. It succeeds without the kSecAttrAccessGroup, which makes sense given the unit test binary does not have com.apple.token Keychain Group. The Xcode UI indicates "Capabilities are not supported" for the unit test binary when attempting to add a Keychain Sharing capability to enable use of persistent tokens. This feels like a dead end but begs the question is there any way to implement unit tests to exercise a persistent token interface? It seems like the only path may be write unit tests that drive an independent app that handles the interactions with the persistent token.
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486
Feb ’25
Crashing in sandbox-exec (FB16964888)
Why are we doing this nonsense? We want to be able to run builds in a sandbox such that they can only see the paths they are intended to depend on, to improve reproducibility. With builds with a very large number of dependencies, there's a very large number of paths added to the sandbox, and it breaks things inside libsandbox. Either it hits some sandbox length limit (sandbox-exec: pattern serialization length 66460 exceeds maximum (65535), Nix issue #4119, worked around: Nix PR 12570), or it hits an assert (this report; also Nix issue #2311). The other options for sandboxing on macOS are not viable; we acknowledge sandbox-exec and sandbox_init_with_parameters are deprecated; App Sandbox is inapplicable because we aren't an app. Our use case is closer to a browser, and all the browsers use libsandbox internally. We could possibly use SystemExtension or a particularly diabolical use of Virtualization.framework, but the former API requires notarization which is close to a no-go for our use case as open source software: it is nearly impossible to develop the software on one's own computer, and it would require us to ship a binary blob (and have the build processes to produce one in infrastructure completely dissimilar to what we use today); it also requires a bunch of engineering time. Today, we can pretend that code signing/notarization doesn't exist and that we are writing an old-school Unix daemon, because we are one. The latter is absolutely diabolical and hard to implement. See this saga about the bug we are facing: Nix issue #4119, Nix issue #2311, etc. What is going wrong I can't attach the file fail.sb as it is too large (you can view the failing test case at Lix's gerrit, CL 2870) and run this: $ sandbox-exec -D _GLOBAL_TMP_DIR=/tmp -f fail.sb /bin/sh Assertion failed: (diff <= INSTR_JUMP_NE_MAX_LENGTH), function push_jne_instr, file serialize.c, line 240. zsh: abort sandbox-exec -D _GLOBAL_TMP_DIR=/tmp -f fail.sb /bin/sh Or a stacktrace: stacktrace.txt Credits Full credits to Jade Lovelace (Lix) for writing the above text and filing a bug. This is submitted under FB16964888
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182
Mar ’25
Title: Sporadical - Permissions Not Cleared After App Uninstallation on iOS18
Title: Sporadical - Permissions Not Cleared After App Uninstallation on iOS18 I install and launch my private MAUI App I ask for example Bluetooth permissions (can be any other permission) I tap Allow button on native settings (or Don't Allow) I unistall app from real phone (we can wait for a while) I install and launch My Private MAUI App I ask for example Bluetooth permissions <- here is an issue. Bluetooth is already granted, so I cannot ask for it again. Occurrence: This issue occurs inconsistently: On iOS 18.5: approximately 5 out of 10 times On iOS 17: approximately 1 out of 50 times Tested using my automated system using Appium latest. After each scenario I unistall app using: "mobile: removeApp" with bundleId
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88
Jun ’25
Safari has slight variances in people's experience
Hi team, if I log into my app on Safari and try to enroll/challenge MFA security key option, I will be able to see this pop-up that gives me the option to pick either passkeys or external security keys However, my team member who's using the same version of safari, can only see the external security key option Why is this?
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314
Mar ’25
App IPA upgrade loses access to keychaingroup
Hi, Our App relies on a keychain to store certificates and key-value pairs. However, when we upgraded from an older XCode 15.2 (1 year old) app version to a newer version XCode 16.2 (with identical keychain-groups entitlement), we found that the newer ipa cannot see the older keychain group anymore... We tried Testflight builds, but limited to only generating newer versions, we tried using the older App's code, cast as a newer App version, and then upgraded to the newer code (with an even newer app version!). Surprisingly we were able to see the older keychain group. So it seems that there's something different between the packaging/profile of the older (1 year) and newer (current) App versions that seems to cause the new version to not see the old keychainGroup... Any ideas?
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192
Aug ’25
App Tracking Transparency - Pre-Modal Explanation
Hi, I hope someone is able to help me with this query: Is there a mandatory requirement to display a view before presenting the App Tracking Transparency modal to explain to the user why the app is asking for tracking? I see there are a few apps which do this, but I don't see any mention of this as a mandatory requirement within the app store review guidelines. The modal can be customised with a description detailing why the app is asking for tracking and I believe this may be sufficient to pass an app store review. The guidelines also mention that the app must provide access to information about how and where the data will be used. We have these details in our privacy policy which is accessible from within the app. Is this sufficient or do we need a pre-modal view which contains a direct link the the privacy policy. Any advice on this would be much appreciated.
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396
Feb ’25
App Attest Validation Nonce Not Matched
Greetings, We are struggling to implement device binding according to your documentation. We are generation a nonce value in backend like this: public static String generateNonce(int byteLength) { byte[] randomBytes = new byte[byteLength]; new SecureRandom().nextBytes(randomBytes); return Base64.getUrlEncoder().withoutPadding().encodeToString(randomBytes); } And our mobile client implement the attestation flow like this: @implementation AppAttestModule - (NSData *)sha256FromString:(NSString *)input { const char *str = [input UTF8String]; unsigned char result[CC_SHA256_DIGEST_LENGTH]; CC_SHA256(str, (CC_LONG)strlen(str), result); return [NSData dataWithBytes:result length:CC_SHA256_DIGEST_LENGTH]; } RCT_EXPORT_MODULE(); RCT_EXPORT_METHOD(generateAttestation:(NSString *)nonce resolver:(RCTPromiseResolveBlock)resolve rejecter:(RCTPromiseRejectBlock)reject) { if (@available(iOS 14.0, *)) { DCAppAttestService *service = [DCAppAttestService sharedService]; if (![service isSupported]) { reject(@"not_supported", @"App Attest is not supported on this device.", nil); return; } NSData *nonceData = [self sha256FromString:nonce]; NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]; NSString *savedKeyId = [defaults stringForKey:@"AppAttestKeyId"]; NSString *savedAttestation = [defaults stringForKey:@"AppAttestAttestationData"]; void (^resolveWithValues)(NSString *keyId, NSData *assertion, NSString *attestationB64) = ^(NSString *keyId, NSData *assertion, NSString *attestationB64) { NSString *assertionB64 = [assertion base64EncodedStringWithOptions:0]; resolve(@{ @"nonce": nonce, @"signature": assertionB64, @"deviceType": @"IOS", @"attestationData": attestationB64 ?: @"", @"keyId": keyId }); }; void (^handleAssertion)(NSString *keyId, NSString *attestationB64) = ^(NSString *keyId, NSString *attestationB64) { [service generateAssertion:keyId clientDataHash:nonceData completionHandler:^(NSData *assertion, NSError *assertError) { if (!assertion) { reject(@"assertion_error", @"Failed to generate assertion", assertError); return; } resolveWithValues(keyId, assertion, attestationB64); }]; }; if (savedKeyId && savedAttestation) { handleAssertion(savedKeyId, savedAttestation); } else { [service generateKeyWithCompletionHandler:^(NSString *keyId, NSError *keyError) { if (!keyId) { reject(@"keygen_error", @"Failed to generate key", keyError); return; } [service attestKey:keyId clientDataHash:nonceData completionHandler:^(NSData *attestation, NSError *attestError) { if (!attestation) { reject(@"attestation_error", @"Failed to generate attestation", attestError); return; } NSString *attestationB64 = [attestation base64EncodedStringWithOptions:0]; [defaults setObject:keyId forKey:@"AppAttestKeyId"]; [defaults setObject:attestationB64 forKey:@"AppAttestAttestationData"]; [defaults synchronize]; handleAssertion(keyId, attestationB64); }]; }]; } } else { reject(@"ios_version", @"App Attest requires iOS 14+", nil); } } @end For validation we are extracting the nonce from the certificate like this: private static byte[] extractNonceFromAttestationCert(X509Certificate certificate) throws IOException { byte[] extensionValue = certificate.getExtensionValue("1.2.840.113635.100.8.2"); if (Objects.isNull(extensionValue)) { throw new IllegalArgumentException("Apple App Attest nonce extension not found in certificate."); } ASN1Primitive extensionPrimitive = ASN1Primitive.fromByteArray(extensionValue); ASN1OctetString outerOctet = ASN1OctetString.getInstance(extensionPrimitive); ASN1Sequence sequence = (ASN1Sequence) ASN1Primitive.fromByteArray(outerOctet.getOctets()); ASN1TaggedObject taggedObject = (ASN1TaggedObject) sequence.getObjectAt(0); ASN1OctetString nonceOctet = ASN1OctetString.getInstance(taggedObject.getObject()); return nonceOctet.getOctets(); } And for the verification we are using this method: private OptionalMethodResult<Void> verifyNonce(X509Certificate certificate, String expectedNonce, byte[] authData) { byte[] expectedNonceHash; try { byte[] nonceBytes = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256").digest(expectedNonce.getBytes()); byte[] combined = ByteBuffer.allocate(authData.length + nonceBytes.length).put(authData).put(nonceBytes).array(); expectedNonceHash = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256").digest(combined); } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) { log.error("Error while validations iOS attestation: {}", e.getMessage(), e); return OptionalMethodResult.ofError(deviceBindError.getChallengeNotMatchedError()); } byte[] actualNonceFromCert; try { actualNonceFromCert = extractNonceFromAttestationCert(certificate); } catch (Exception e) { log.error("Error while extracting nonce from certificate: {}", e.getMessage(), e); return OptionalMethodResult.ofError(deviceBindError.getChallengeNotMatchedError()); } if (!Arrays.equals(expectedNonceHash, actualNonceFromCert)) { return OptionalMethodResult.ofError(deviceBindError.getChallengeNotMatchedError()); } return OptionalMethodResult.empty(); } But the values did not matched. What are we doing wrong here? Thanks.
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934
Sep ’25
Detecting SIM Swap and Implementing SIM Binding in iOS
Hi Forum, We’re building a security-focused SDK for iOS that includes SIM Binding and SIM Swap detection to help prevent fraud and unauthorised device access, particularly in the context of banking and fintech apps. We understand that iOS limits access to SIM-level data, and that previously available APIs (such as those in CoreTelephony, now deprecated from iOS 16 onwards) provide only limited support for these use cases. We have a few questions and would appreciate any guidance from the community or Apple engineers: Q1. Are there any best practices or Apple-recommended approaches for binding a SIM to a device or user account? Q2. Is there a reliable way to detect a SIM swap when the app is not running (e.g., via system callback, entitlement, or background mechanism)? Q3. Are fields like GID1, GID2, or ICCID accessible through any public APIs or entitlements (such as com.apple.coretelephony.IdentityAccess)? If so, what is the process to request access? Q4. For dual SIM and eSIM scenarios, is there a documented approach to identify which SIM is active or whether a SIM slot has changed? Q5. In a banking or regulated environment, is it possible for an app vendor (e.g., a bank) to acquire certain entitlements from Apple and securely expose that information to a security SDK like ours? What would be the compliant or recommended way to structure such a partnership? Thanks in advance for any insights!
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456
Jul ’25
Issue with record.changePassword Clearing Keychain Information Hello,
I am developing a sample authorization plugin to sync the user’s local password to the network password. During the process, I prompt the user to enter both their old and new passwords in custom plugin. After the user enters the information, I use the following code to sync the passwords: try record.changePassword(oldPssword, toPassword: newPassword) However, I have noticed that this is clearing all saved keychain information, such as web passwords and certificates. Is it expected behavior for record.changePassword to clear previously stored keychain data? If so, how can I overcome this issue and ensure the keychain information is preserved while syncing the password? Thank you for your help!
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136
Mar ’25
SecPKCS12Import fails in Tahoe
We are using SecPKCS12Import C API in our application to import a self seigned public key certificate. We tried to run the application for the first time on Tahoe and it failed with OSStatus -26275 error. The release notes didn't mention any deprecation or change in the API as per https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-26-release-notes. Are we missing anything? There are no other changes done to our application.
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764
Sep ’25