Introducing SQLCipher for Windows Phone 8 and Windows Runtime
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of new SQLCipher Commercial Edition packages for Windows Phone 8 and Windows Runtime 8/8.1. Over the past year, interest and adoption of these platforms has increased dramatically, and SQLCipher is now able to provide a quick and easy way to secure application data. This is particularly exciting because SQLCipher libraries now offer a common, interoperable, secure database solution across major mobile, tablet, and desktop platforms.
Application Integration
The new SQLCipher libraries integrate seamlessly within Visual Studio. The client API based is on the popular sqlite-net library that provides a compact ORM and both synchronous and asynchronous interfaces. As with other integrations, applications use the high level API to manipulate data using the ORM and/or SQL, while SQLCipher works behind the scenes to manage all aspects of security, including key derivation and on-the-fly encryption and decryption of the database pages.
This architecture supports rapid implementation on both platforms, and applications that already use SQLite on Windows Phone or Windows Runtime can be converted to SQLCipher in as little as a few hours. Application using these new SQLCipher libraries for Windows Runtime can easily inter-operate and access SQLCipher databases generated on other platforms, including iOS, Android, and Windows Desktop. Furthermore, both packages include CipherCare Plus, providing prioritized and confidential email support directly from the SQLCipher development team to help integrators get up and running quickly.
Technical Details
SQLCipher for Windows Phone 8 and Windows Runtime are based on the latest version of SQLCipher 3, and take advantage of many of the newest features. For example, porting SQLCipher to run on Windows Phone 8 and Windows Runtime introduced some unique challenges. On some other platforms, SQLCipher relies on OpenSSL for underlying cryptographic operations, however, it is not easily supported on either Windows Phone 8 or Windows Runtime. Thus, the new packages take advantage of SQLCipher's pluggable crypto providers, allowing the use of LibTomCrypt's AES implementation and the Fortuna PRNG. Particular care is taken to seed the PRNG entropy pool with a rich, externally sourced cryptographically secure random data block, which is feed into the the crypto provider using the new PRAGMA cipher_add_random. Finally, databases created using SQLCipher benefit from strong default key derivation using 64,000 iterations of PBKDF2 to protect against brute force and dictionary based attacks.
Get Started
SQLCipher continues to support critical application developer requirements for easy to use data storage security. If you are interested in using SQLCipher on Windows Phone 8 or Windows Runtime, please checkout our Commercial Edition page to order now or request a trial. If you have any questions reach out to us and we'd glad to help!
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