Apple opens up its cryptographic libraries to third-party developers

Apple is encouraging developers to create more secure apps with its latest open-source release.

Today, Apple announced it will open up its cryptographic libraries to third-party developers in an effort to persuade them to build more robust security into their apps.

Third-party developers will have access to Apple’s Security Framework and Common Crypto libraries, which feature code for handling encryption, tokenization, security certificates, and management of public and private keys, among other security protocols.

“Both Security Framework and Common Crypto rely on the corecrypto library to provide implementations of low level cryptographic primitives. This is also the library submitted for validation of compliance with U.S. Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 Level 1. Although corecrypto does not directly provide programming interfaces for developers and should not be used by iOS or OS X apps, the source code is available to allow for verification of its security characteristics and correct functioning,” the company says on its site.

This is the second time in recent history that Apple has moved to open source some of its code. In June, the company announced it would open source its Swift programming language to help it catch on with developers. Swift hasn’t been open sourced yet, but Apple says it will be by the end of the year.