On May 14, 2014, at 7:15 AM, Roland King <r...@rols.org> wrote:

> If you ask a similar question to the original poster on any of the Apple 
> Developer Forums you'll be advised not to generate key pairs on a device but 
> to do it on a server (the advice will probably come from Quinn)

That’s a weird idea. If the server creates the key-pair, then the server knows 
your private key, which I would consider a major security breach. If you’re 
going to trust the server with your credentials, you might as well skip the 
fiddly encryption stuff altogether and save yourself a lot of work. Otherwise 
the public keys and certs are just mumbo-jumbo to give the appearance of 
security.

Put another way: one of the major purposes of public-key crypto is to put you 
in charge of your own encryption. You generate a key-pair locally on your 
device/computer, and the private key is known only to you and never leaves that 
device (except maybe inside a passcode-protected PKCS12 file.) I think of 
private keys as being like nuclear fuel rods — you keep them in a heavily 
shielded container (the Keychain) and never let them be exposed to daylight. If 
you do that, you have a very secure system.

—Jens
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