Apple Announces CryptoKit For Digital Wallet Developers

Apple has announced the launch of CryptoKit, a Swift API that will perform basic cryptographic functions for its iOS 13 software release, according to a report by CoinDesk.

The announcement was made during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. The new framework will offer key generation, hashing, encryption and exchange for developers. It will replace Apple’s previous framework, CommonCrypto, which did not have Swift support.

The new framework will let developers steer clear of lower-level interfaces by taking away the management of raw pointers and overwriting sensitive data without prompting while memory deallocation is happening.

“System frameworks encrypt both data at rest and data in transit in a transparent way for you,” Apple said. “This functionality is available by simply setting an attribute. However, you may want to do more to protect your users’ data. CryptoKit is a new Swift framework that makes it easier and safer than ever to perform cryptographic operations, whether you simply need to compute a hash or are implementing a more advanced authentication protocol.”

Data encryption will be possible both at rest and in transit.

However, the new framework will not support the secp256k1 curve, which is used by Ethereum and similar blockchains, meaning CryptoKit doesn’t have a lot of uses for cryptocurrencies.

This has bothered some developers. For instance, blockchain developer Ronald Mannak wrote on Twitter that “YOUR IPHONE WILL NOT BE A HARDWARE WALLET.”

Ouriel Ohayon, co-founder of ZenGo, said that “for now, (CryptoKit) is pretty much useless for cryptocurrencies because, one, it does not use the relevant elliptic curves for blockchains, and two, there is no access to the secure enclave to export and migrate private keys if you need to. I do anticipate (Apple) to go that route a few years from now, and it will make the industry a lot better.”