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Chapter 18. Contacts, Calendars, and Secrets > Storing Secrets
18.6. Storing Secrets
The Keychain API, unlike Address Book, is purely procedural C. There are Objective-C wrappers around it provided by third parties[1] but none are shipped by Apple.
[1] For example, the BSD-licensed Keychain framework (http://sourceforge.net/projects/keychain/).
The keychain API is massive, and wraps the Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA), which is even more complicated. The API description for CDSA is as long as this entire book and is quite dense. A full description of the power and flexibility of this system is far beyond the scope of this book—the Keychain itself is not technically part of Cocoa since it is a pure C API—but we will look at a few common keychain tasks, since they are important for providing a good user experience.
