Securing SharedPreferences data

Android provides a simple framework for app developers to persistently store key-value pairs of primitive datatypes. This recipe illustrates a practical use of a pseudorandomly generated secret key and demonstrates the use of Secure-Preferences . It is an open source library that wraps the default Android SharedPreferences to encrypt the key-value pairs for protecting them against attackers. Secure-Preferences is compatible with Android 2.1+, and is licensed with Apache 2.0; hence, it is suitable for commercial development.

I should add that I'm the co-creator and maintainer of the Secure-Preferences library. A good alternative to Secure-Preferences is a library called Cwac-prefs that is backed by SQLCipher (covered in a later recipe).

Getting ready

Let's add the Secure-Preferences library.

1. Download or clone Secure-Preferences from GitHub at https://github.com/scottyab/secure-preferences.

   The Secure-Preferences repository contains an Android library project and...