We’ve got another Codebook development update post available for the month, this time over on the discussion forum, in case anybody wants to leave feedback directly. Like the last one in November, it has news about our current efforts, what we’ll be working on next, and how we’ve been responding to feedback and bug reports. We have a few point release updates on the way, but we’ll be holding off until after the holidays so we can provide proper customer support should anything arise.

Happy holidays from all of us here at Zetetic!

Today we released Codebook 4.3.0 with support for AutoFill on Android and macOS Big Sur, along with several other improvements and bug fixes for Windows. Please read on for highlights; download links and version requirements are available here:

https://www.zetetic.net/codebook/documentation/requirements/

Autofill for Android

Codebook for Android version 4.3.0 includes a new Autofill feature allowing you to seamlessly fill in your passwords and other other data into login forms in other apps and websites.

macOS Big Sur and Password AutoFill

Codebook for macOS 4.3.0 is ready to go on macOS Big Sur 11! Mostly we needed to adopt the new Big Sur UI for the application windows, and update our app icon. However, we were also able to take advantage of the new Password AutoFill support in macOS Big Sur!

Update: There’s a bug in 4.3.0 for macOS, Codebook’s Password AutoFill extension isn’t showing up in System Preferences > Extensions, making the feature unavailable. This affects both the Direct and Mac App Store versions. Version 4.3.1 is on the way with a fix right now, our apologies!

Other things to note about this update for macOS:

• The new minimum version of macOS that Codebook supports is 10.12 (previously it was 10.10). If you can’t upgrade right now, that’s okay, the new version doesn’t break compatibility for sync with previous versions.
• ⚠️ The encrypted database location in your Home folder has changed! Please update any scripts or backup jobs that use the old location.

The new database location path for macOS is (all one line):

~/Library/Group Containers/PD7G6HRMGV.net.zetetic.STRIP/Strip/default.strip/strip.db

Codebook for Windows

Codebook for Windows 4.3.0 provides several minor feature updates and bug fixes, including:

• Adds a new Exclude Characters feature on the Password Generator
• Password Weakness Warnings are displayed when setting a Master Password
• Adds a new License Key window for easier access within the application

What About iOS?

Update: Since a few people have (quite reasonably) already asked: Codebook for iOS 4.3 with support for iOS 14 is already available, visit this page in the App Store using your device to get the latest version. We released 4.3.0 in early September and followed that up with 4.3.1, which adds support for the latest iPhone and iPad screen sizes.

Need Help?

As always, please feel to reach out to us at support@zetetic.net. You can also provide feedback and ask questions on our community discussion forum.

We are pleased to announce that SQLCipher 4.4.2 is now available. It includes the following important changes:

SQLCipher Core

• Improved error handling to resolve potential corruption if an encryption operation failed while operating in WAL mode
• Changes to OpenSSL library cryptographic provider to reduce initialization complexity
• Adjusts PRAGMA cipher_integrity_check to skip locking page to avoid a spurious error report for very large databases

SQLCipher Commercial and Enterprise

The following changes and enhancements are available for Commercial and Enterprise packages:

• non-FIPS macOS, iOS, and Mac Catalyst packages have been updated to support build and execution on new Apple Silicon (arm64) devices
• the minimum SDK for macOS packages using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic module is now 10.9 to enable signing and notarization
• all packages now enable the DBSTAT Virtual Table to expose useful information about databases for analysis

Availability

Commercial and Enterprise - On-demand access to new releases of SQLCipher packages are available to all licensees with an active support subscription from the Customer Downloads fulfillment site. Licensees will also receive a separate email notification regarding the update and can contact us at any time for private support directly from the SQLCipher development team.

Community Edition - SQLCipher Community Edition source code is available on GitHub, via AAR packaging for Android, and CocoaPods for iOS.

Time for a quick status update on what’s cooking for Codebook password manager and when we expect to release the next version!

As we noted back in September over on the discussion forum, we have a few exciting updates on the way, specifically for the Android, macOS, and Windows versions of Codebook. The main highlights are:

1. Codebook Autofill for Android
2. Password AutoFill for macOS Big Sur
3. Password Weakness Warnings and other feature-parity changes for Windows

We’ve been aiming to release the three of them together as version 4.3.0. Lining up a multi-platform release isn’t easy, and isn’t technically necessary here like it might be if these were huge changes, but when it comes time to reach out and communicate what’s new it helps a lot. People are really inundated these days!

Here’s where we’re at:

• On Android we are finishing up beta testing on the new Autofill feature and are preparing for release.
• On Windows we are nearly ready to go, but found some small edge-cases and one unrelated crasher that we want to fix up before we declare it ready for release.
• On macOS we are ready to go—as of this morning Apple appears to have fixed a bug in their App Store validation that prevented anybody from submitting macOS apps that support Password AutoFill in Big Sur to the Mac App Store (even though macOS Big Sur supports it and was released last week!)

We expect to be done preparing for release (final adjustments and testing, final builds, announcements, website updates, moving builds into place, etc) by the end of this week. However, next week does not make for a good time to release software with the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States. While these updates should be high in fiber and low impact, there’s always a chance something can go wrong and we want to make sure we’re on deck and ready to respond should the release not go as planned. Thus, we’re looking at November 30th for the release date.

If you’re a Mac user who has already upgraded to macOS Big Sur 11, the current version of Codebook now available should work mostly fine with a couple of minor wrinkles. However, if you are raring to go with the updated UI and AutoFill support you may access the latest Beta version now. Users of the Direct version of Codebook for macOS have an Updates tab on the Preferences window; set Release Channel to Beta and click on Check For Updates (Mac App Store users who wish to beta test should send us an email for access).

An aside: If you’re wondering, “what about 4.3.0 for iOS?” That’s already been released with support for iOS 14, and a subsequent update for compatibility with the screen sizes of the new iPhone 12 models Apple announced a few weeks back.

Attachments

Version 4.3.0 is not the only development effort underway right now! We have been hammering away at adding image storage to Codebook, allowing you to attach images to Entry records. This is the first step towards support for attaching and storing other types of files as well. The Images feature is about ready to go on macOS and iOS, we’re pretty far along on the Android implementation, and plan to start working on the Windows interface soon. Much of the groundwork for this feature is already in place from the Codebook 4 update last year that introduced a new sync system capable of supporting file attachments with speed and efficiency, and made changes to the database structure to ensure forward-compatibility.

Our thinking is to release Images on all four platforms at the same time as Codebook 5.

We’re going to need to do some extensive beta testing for this feature. If you’d like to test Images in Codebook, getting early access to a really cool new feature and helping us ensure that it’s robust and performs well, please reach out and let us know.

Join the Discussion

Want to join in the conversation? We’d love to hear from you! Please stop by our community discussion site to keep up with what’s new and share your thoughts.

We are pleased to announce that SQLCipher 4.4.1 is now available. It includes the following important changes:

SQLCipher Core

• Updates baseline to upstream SQLite 3.33.0
• Fixes double-free bug in cipher_default_plaintext_header_size
• Changes SQLCipher tests to use suite runner
• Improvement to cipher_integrity_check tests to minimize false negatives
• Deprecates PRAGMA cipher_store_pass

SQLCipher Commercial and Enterprise

A new benchmarking and performance test extension provides a way to perform comparative analysis between different encryption settings, application releases, SQLCipher versions, database designs, and queries. This new feature will prove useful to developers interested in optimizing their applications when using SQLCipher.

We are pleased to add official Linux native and .NET packages for the latest version of SQLCipher. These new packages contain full support for SQLCipher Commercial and Enterprise edition extensions like Value Level Encryption, Encrypted Virtual Tables, Performance Counters, and the new benchmarking feature.

SQLCipher’s cross-platform .NET based packages for Windows, macOS, Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, and Linux have now been updated to support the latest Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite.Core 3 and Microsoft.Data.Sqlite.Core 3. The new minimum supported framework version for these SQLCipher packages is .NET Standard 2.x. Note that SQLCipher is now using SQLitePCLRaw 2.x. On UWP platforms, applications may need to call sqlite3_win32_set_directory() explicitly using this version.

The SQLCipher for ADO.NET compatibility package for System.Data.Sqlite on Windows now requires .NET Framework 4.6 or higher.

SQLCipher for Windows Enterprise packages using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic module have been updated to depend on Visual C++ 2015 redistributable runtime files. Customers using Zetetic’s special FIPS packages and upgrading to the new version must ensure installation of the proper runtime components alongside SQLCipher.

Availability

Commercial and Enterprise - On-demand access to new releases of SQLCipher packages are available to all licensees with an active support subscription from the Customer Downloads fulfillment site. Licensees will also receive a separate email notification regarding the update and can contact us at any time for private support directly from the SQLCipher development team.

Community Edition - SQLCipher 4.4.1 in source format is directly available on GitHub. The Community Edition of SQLCipher for Android is available via AAR packaging. The Community Edition of SQLCipher for iOS can be compiled from source or using CocoaPods.