The FIPS provider will likely not work with iOS as it currently stands.
The development team are not up to speed on iOS and not much effort was
put into supporting it (or Android for the same reason). We didn't even
get remotely close to having code signed.
Paul Dale
On 27/1/22 4:41 am, Kevin Millson wrote:
Hello All,
Has anyone tried using the FIPS provider on iOS and got it uploaded
and successfully reviewed by Apple?
Apple won't let you just put the 'fips.dylib' in your app's bundle so
we've wrapped it in a iOS Framework Bundle, which solves some of the
problems. But Apple are scanning the dylib's mach-o header and finding
the type bit field set to 'bundle' rather than 'execute' and rejecting
it. I think they might also be looking for particular load commands in
the header and not finding them either. I guess changes to the FIPS
build process are required to effect any change to the file header?
The Framework Bundle must be signed, as every iOS executable must be,
so this has to be done before the FIPS Configuration is created via
FIPS Install. If you try to perform these operations in the reverse
order, i.e. create configuration and then sign, then the values within
the configuration won't match the calculated values when the FIPS
Provider subsequently loads and runs. I haven't examined the
implementation of FIPS Install but I suspect it's not just examining
the mach-o segment with the executable code in it and is instead
detecting any change, i.e. also header changes as a result of iOS
signing. Currently we create configurations for all our signing
scenarios and then ensure individual FIPS frameworks are not re-signed
at any point subsequently. Sign for App Store Distribution remains
troublesome though and what if Apple re-sign the app and consequently
the FIPS framework? Failure to load the FIPS Provider would then result.
So we're unsure how OpenSSL 3 FIPS can be deployed within iOS apps
from the Apple App Store. Would be great to hear whether anyone else
has got this working and through an Apple app review.
