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Is there a way to securely take a picture on an iOS device?

The expectation is, that all of the following is true:

  • the image data is loaded into the RAM and made available for processing
  • the image is not persisted permanently
  • the image is not persisted temporarily (swapping)
  • if the image is swapped, its encrypted before
  • the image can not be accessed from within other applications

It's about corporate usage with high privacy expectations and governmental rules regarding data protection. I have no detailed iOS programming background, and appreciate any in depth answer.

Pekka
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GeorgieF
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  • This can probably not be answered in its current form without an even clearer definition of "securely" and knowing which governmental rules you are referring to exactly. http://security.stackexchange.com is probably a better place for this but do add detail to the question before posting there – Pekka Jul 15 '15 at 08:52
  • So you say, the above spec is not enough as a scope? – GeorgieF Jul 15 '15 at 08:55
  • On second thought, it may be; I'm not an expert in iOS nor security so I can't tell. This is not likely to fly on Stack Overflow due to its broad nature, though. Security.SE might work better and be more tolerant towards a question that is likely to have a looong complex answer. (The downvote here is not mine though) – Pekka Jul 15 '15 at 08:56

1 Answers1

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Yes, of course you can easily write a program to meet this spec (subject to the guarantees of app sandboxing that iOS provides, which are pretty good, but as ever Government agencies with unlimited budgets can probably get round most of those roadblocks).

The Camera API passes you the video/stills data (in RAM as you describe it), and after that it's entirely up to you how your program handles it.

If you don't want to write it out to disk then simply don't do so, if you want to write it encrypted then encrypt before writing, if you want to write it to a location where only your app can access it then do so, etc.

zmarties
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