I've just checked in support for local database encryption. It will appear in a 
future release of Couchbase Lite, for all supported platforms, but right now 
it's on a branch and for iOS/Mac-only. (And, of course, experimental.)

As I've said before, this isn't for everyone. In general, the default 
filesystem encryption on iOS is good enough. But some apps have to guarantee 
full security even if the user hasn't set a passphrase, and are willing to put 
up with the annoyance of prompting the user for a passcode on every launch. 
(Also, this would be useful on Mac OS, since it would protect the database 
against even other apps on the computer. In this environment it's safe to store 
the key in the Keychain.)

Features:
Uses AES-256 encryption algorithm. (No one says "military-grade" anymore, but 
this is basically the go-to algorithm for highly secure but fast encryption. 
It's approved <http://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/2253/16754> by the US 
Government for Top-Secret data, and used by Apple for iOS file encryption and 
Mac FileVault.)
Protects the entire database file (using SQLCipher <http://sqlcipher.net/>, a 
widely used fork of SQLite), and attachments.
Should be only a few percent slower than normal.
You can provide the key as either a passphrase, or a raw 256-bit AES key.

I've written a wiki page 
<https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-ios/wiki/Database-Encryption> that 
explains how to build and use it. You absolutely should not put this into a 
shipping app yet, but we'd greatly appreciate it if people tried it out and 
reported any issues.

—Jens

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