SSL communication from iOS app to server

Question

I'm fairly new to SSL and secure connections in general. What are the major steps required for an iOS app to talk to a server over a secure communications channel?

I'm aware that an SSL certificate will probably be necessary. I'm planning to purchase one from a trusted certificate authority. However I'm not sure if both the app and the server need certificates or if it's just the server. Also I'm not sure how to handle SSL errors. Perhaps there's a library that can help with this like ASIHTTPRequest or similar.

Answer 1

If you are using HTTPS as your protocol for communication and have valid certificates on your server all that should be required is changing your http:// to https:// on your client. For HTTP libraries a very popular option now is AFNetworking. It is a bit better maintained than ASI and has some nice block features not supported by ASI.

As far as SSL errors, it is usually a good idea to present the warnings to end users (through alert views or some other means). They could point to real security attacks (but more likely will point to miss configured or expired certificates).