Question: Encryption

[rops]

Is there any way to support encryption?

[andpor]

in short yes. does it support it now? Obviously not. Would it be easy to add encryption? I have to think about a proper x-platform approach considering native libs on Android etc...

[brody4hire]

A relatively easy way would be to use SQLCipher. I support a SQLCipher version of the Cordova plugin at: https://github.com/litehelpers/Cordova-sqlcipher-adapter

[dryganets]

Hey Andpor,

I'm working on encryption implementation for android and ios in our internal repository.
I would be eager to contribute back to your project.

I have following questions for you:

1. which project would better suit for integration of android sqlitecipher? android or android-native. I'm not exactly sure what would be purpose of native proejct with the sqlitecypher.
   Internally I've made it in android as it's way easier to do - just replace the import and it works.
   I'm not sure if that make sense to do in android-native as sqlitecipher for android is absolutely different native implementation of sqltie with encryption enabled on the page level.
2. for iOS what would be the best way to integrate sqlite cyper? It looks like I would need to have an access to the library sources at least according to this tutorial:
   https://www.zetetic.net/sqlcipher/ios-tutorial/
   Would you be ok with git submodule?
3. Also we would need to have a different api as for migration purposes we would need to be able to open some databases in encrypted mode and some in unencrypted.
   That would require some API changes.
   Would you prefer to have an additional method to open db in encryped mode or
   to have an additional password argument to the existing open method?

[brody4hire]

To be honest I would favor supporting sqlcipher in a separate project. SQLCipher adds some things that the rest of the community would not want for a couple major reasons:

• relatively minor: sqlcipher has additional license terms though permissive
• major: including encryption capability leads to additional export requirements ref: https://discuss.zetetic.net/t/export-requirements-for-applications-using-sqlcipher/47

This is what I did in the Cordova sqlite/sqlcipher plugins that I maintain. Yes it would probably be a pain to keep merging changes but this may be the best solution for now.

[maxpowa]

@andpor do you plan to create a sqlcipher version of this? Looking to use this library in a react app but need sqlcipher support - If you don't plan to create one, we might do it ourselves.

cc @itsrifat @ericsvmx

[brody4hire]

@maxpowa you may have to do it yourself. I don't think the owner @andpor will do this and @dryganets seems to have dropped off. I hope someone will share a version with sqlcipher with the user community.

To answer some questions raised by @dryganets:

which project would better suit for integration of android sqlitecipher? android or android-native. I'm not exactly sure what would be purpose of native proejct with the sqlitecypher.
Internally I've made it in android as it's way easier to do - just replace the import and it works.

I think that is the correct way, assuming you include the SQLCipher JAR and native libs. The android-native version uses my Android-sqlite-connector library which is currently not supported with SQLCipher. (I hope to do this someday ref: sqlcipher/sqlcipher#125)

for iOS what would be the best way to integrate sqlite cyper? It looks like I would need to have an access to the library sources at least according to this tutorial:
https://www.zetetic.net/sqlcipher/ios-tutorial/
Would you be ok with git submodule?

I tried using a git submodule in the past and was not so happy with it. It adds an extra build step which is not so great for plugins and I find it a bit inflexible in certain ways. For example: if I would remove an external module from git then add it again (from a different location for example) there is still an extra artifact in the local .git tree in the way.

I think your best bet is to just include the sqlcipher code, libs, and dependencies in your git repo. You should be able to use git to merge in updates from this git project moving forward. I can think of the following extra alternatives:

• In the original cordova-sqlite-storage project I fetch the sqlite dependencies by npm through a Cordova hook script but this causes problems with some build systems.
• It may be possible to use a npm prepublish script to include external module dependencies, like I see in https://github.com/nolanlawson/cordova-plugin-sqlite-2.

[dryganets]

I could prepare a pull request with SQLite cipher for both iOS and android If there are enough people interested in it.

We are using this internally for a few months.

It's worth to mention that SQLite cipher supports only exclusive transactions out of the box so you might experience some performance degradation as result of usage of the plugin.

I have a couple of fixes to share with the community as well.

In the long term, we are going to move to our internal implementation as:

1. Error handling is not production ready. We have some hard to explain crashes in production inside of the current plugin implementation. I was trying to inject the errors in different paths of the native code and I still can't repeat the same problem. It says that transaction has failed but in reality, hell know what happened inside.
2. Transactions implementation is weird. I don't understand why I need artificial Select 1;. Read transaction should be a non-exclusive transaction. Write transaction should be an exclusive transaction. Now read is select 1 and write is a read transaction. We have a transaction which needs to live during multiple bridge round trips and be exclusive. Now it's true only because of SQLite cipher transaction implementation.
3. Native threading model allows only single thread per DB. One thread for the DB is probably good enough for most of the cases but I want to experiment with it in order to improve application startup time.

If plans wouldn't change I will start on our internal implementation of the plugin in typescript. But it would take a time to release it's publically.

[dryganets]

@brodybits,
As promised I send pull requests with our changes required for SQLiteCipher to work.
This is the first part not actually related to SQLiteCipher itself so it could be contributed to the main repository.

Android toLowerCase fix for Turkish locale. It's a root cause of insert and begin commands failures for Turkish locale. Probably specific to SQLiteCipher too, but the fix is safe anyway:
#128

Android correctly close statements and queries:
#132

You need to merge #131
in order to make android-native compile again.

iOS fix for crash on module dealloc:
#130

[andpor]

@dryganets - this is awesome. Thanks a lot for these. I will review and merge tonight.

[dryganets]

https://github.com/dryganets/react-native-sqlite-storage/tree/sergeyd/sqlite-cipher

has our implementation.

I would make sure that iOS builds correctly tomorrow.
See android module for android integration.
ios integration is done through cocoapods
just pass the key parameter in addition and it would encrypt your database.

[brody4hire]

From #132 (comment):

@dryganets Sergey - if it is a small diff maybe it would make sense to incorporate it somehow to this module...I would have no objections actually..can you suggest something?

@andpor I would recommend keeping encryption separate. When publishing apps with encryption people would have to follow the guide at https://discuss.zetetic.net/t/export-requirements-for-applications-using-sqlcipher/47 and it may be even worse in places like France.

[dryganets]

Yep, It's better to make a plugin system.
That would give you control over the library you use and wouldn't require an additional dependency if you don't need it.

In addition to that we get rid of an extra project with code duplication.

[itinance]

According to @brodybits arguments: can we leave this optional per #ifdef direction on objC-Side and something similar on android?
For those who need encryption they can activate it then easily and others don't have to ship one more MB with the app and aren't bothered by the export-requirements for apps using cipher