Apple Announces New CryptoKit APIs and Other Updates

Apple shared an update to its developer page to announce updates to CryptoKit, like new APIs, support for PEM and DER formats, and Swift Crypto. Apple released CryptoKit in iOS 13 to give developers a framework to perform cryptographic operations more easily.

CryptoKit

First, the update adds new standalone APIs for HMAC-based Extract-and-Expand Key Derivation Functions (HKDF) in iOS 14. Developers can use it for quick tasks like deriving multiple keys from a master secret.

CryptoKit now supports PEM and DER formats to pass these types of encoded data to initialize CryptoKit public and private keys, without needing a separate library to perform the conversion.

Finally, support for Swift means developers can create cross-platform tools using CryptoKit on all the platforms supported by Swift, which includes Linux and servers.

Apple software engineer Cory Benfield discussed Swift cryptography at the dotSwift 2020 conference.

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