Integrating App Shielding

The Shielding Tool is used to automatically integrate App Shielding with an existing iOS application as a post compilation operation. This can in principle be performed on any iOS application format (.ipa, .app, or .zip).

It is also possible to integrate App Shielding into a framework rather than an app. See Integrating App Shielding into a framework for more information.

This Shielding Tool will modify the application with the following steps:

1. Include App Shielding native libraries into the app.

2. Inject code to load App Shielding once the app is started.

3. Include App Shielding runtime configuration into the app.

In addition the Shielding Tool will create Bindings between the app and App Shielding to prevent the app from functioning if App Shielding is removed ('repackaging').

The Shielding Tool can be used in two separate ways: as a standalone command line tool on a signed application or as part of the Xcode build phase in Xcode mode.

The Shielding Tool can integrate one of two different versions of App Shielding: a debug version or a release version. The debug version allows you to disable certain security checks so you can debug the app in, for instance, Xcode. The release version forces some of these security checks to always be on and is the only version that should be used for distributed apps.

The debug version sets the MinimumOSVersion to an invalid number, which prevents the application from being wrongfully submitted to the App Store.