NSUserDefaults and Keychain

Question

I am relatively new iphone developer. I need authentication process for my apps and I need the password and username to stored securely. I had read up some of the topics relating this in this forum.

It seems that the keychain is the better way to store the data securely and I come across the post about recommending this library.

PDKeychainBindingsController

I have tried the library and it is as easy to use as NSUserDefault. But what confuses me is that NSUserDefaults is not used in the first place to store credentials because their content can be easily hacked as some of the post mentioned.

Then my question here is that how secured is it to use above mentioned library as it still uses NSUserDefault to access keychain and my key in NSUserDefault would be still visible if the NSUserDefault is hacked.

I am a bit confused on that part and I would like any clarification on the topic if possible. I think I am missing something.

Answer 1

When you use PDKeychainBindingsController, you should call [PDKeychainBindings sharedKeychainBindings] and then set/get all string to/from the keychain. The PDKeychainBindingsController will call keychain API(which is C, hard to use) for you. That means actually all [[PDKeychainBindings sharedKeychainBindings] setObject:... forKey...] will be kept in keychain. Don't worry to use it!