Cocoa AES Encryption NSData and Bytearrays - cocoa

Question

I'm using the following code to encrypt files in cocoa:
- (NSData *)AES256EncryptWithKey:(NSString *)key
{
// 'key' should be 32 bytes for AES256, will be null-padded otherwise
char keyPtr[kCCKeySizeAES256 + 1]; // room for terminator (unused)
bzero( keyPtr, sizeof( keyPtr ) ); // fill with zeroes (for padding)
// fetch key data
[key getCString:keyPtr maxLength:sizeof( keyPtr ) encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSUInteger dataLength = [self length];
//See the doc: For block ciphers, the output size will always be less than or
//equal to the input size plus the size of one block.
//That's why we need to add the size of one block here
size_t bufferSize = dataLength + kCCBlockSizeAES128;
void *buffer = malloc( bufferSize );
size_t numBytesEncrypted = 0;
CCCryptorStatus cryptStatus = CCCrypt( kCCEncrypt, kCCAlgorithmAES128, kCCOptionPKCS7Padding,
keyPtr, kCCKeySizeAES256,
NULL /* initialization vector (optional) */,
[self bytes], dataLength, /* input */
buffer, bufferSize, /* output */
&numBytesEncrypted );
if( cryptStatus == kCCSuccess )
{
//the returned NSData takes ownership of the buffer and will free it on deallocation
return [NSData dataWithBytesNoCopy:buffer length:numBytesEncrypted];
}
free( buffer ); //free the buffer
return nil;
}
And wrote this for the connection to the file:
NSString *filePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"foo" ofType:#"rtf"];
NSData *data = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:filePath];
NSString *key = [withFileKey stringValue];
NSString *newStr = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSString *encrypted = [newStr AES256EncryptWithKey:key];
NSLog(#"File encryption:%#", encrypted);
[filePathName setStringValue:filePath];
if (!data) {
NSLog(#"Unable to read file");
}
Basically what I did was first of all get the filepath of the file the user wants. Then convert the data in the file to a string. Then encrypt that string with the AES256EncryptWithKey: method. However, when I decrypt a plain text file for example, it returns a bunch of garbage like fonts and all that stuff, then the few lines I wrote. Something like this:
\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1138\cocoasubrtf100
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;\f1\fnil\fcharset0 Menlo-Bold;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\margl1440\margr1440\vieww10800\viewh8400\viewkind0
\pard\tx720\tx1440\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\tx5040\tx5760\tx6480\tx7200\tx7920\tx8640\pardirnatural
\f0\fs24 \cf0 Hello my name is bobby bob\
\
\pard\tx560\pardeftab560\pardirnatural
\f1\b\fs22 \cf0 \CocoaLigature0 YAY!\
and I am awesome!!}
Shouldn't I be taking the data and then encrypting that (conversion to bytes), then convert the encrypted data and convert it to a string to display? I tried something like that but it didn't work. :(
Something like:
NSData *encryptedData = [data AES256EncryptWithKey:yourkey];
And then:
NSString *convertData = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
?
Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Your code appears hard-coded to load foo.rtf. This looks like an RTF file. Where is the "plain text file" you're talking about?
EDIT We had a lot of discussion on this, so I wrote up a blog post about how to correctly use CCCrypt().