CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ios
woutr_be
woutr_be

Reputation: 9722

Securely storing data, how do apps do it?

I'm doing some research on a new project we want to work on, but before we actually take on the project I have some concerns.

This project involves storing a lot of (text) data somewhere on a server, you can think about it like Instagram (but without photos). So you can follow people, view profiles, list of activity ...

The question is, how do these apps send all this data securely to a server? And what kind of server do they use? Something like Amazon AWS?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 304

Answers (1)

Rudiger
Rudiger

Reputation: 6769

They are sent over https which is built into the NSURLConnection class. You can have a server (I use linux but you can use anything) have a self signed ssl certificate and your App code can give an exception to that particular URL for self signed certificates if you are wanting to save money. It is better practice and more secure to have a signed certificate though.

As far as storing it, most don't actually store it encrypted. It is sent to the server running a web service encrypted and then is stored in the database / file system unencrypted. The reason for this is there is a lot of processing power required to compress things and the extra over head of storing encrypted things as well as making it harder to search and index depending on how you do it.

Amazon AWS would work although I run my own server at home. It's quite easy to set up.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions