Passing NSURLCredential in XPC connection fail in decoder

Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch
1

Hi,

I’d like to perform client-side certificate authentication from https based connection in macOS.

I’m using the method didReceiveChallenge from URLSession. However, I cannot read the keychain directly since my process is running as Daemon, and my client certificate reside in login keychain.

Therefore, I send this authentication request to a user-based process which is running in the current user so it has access to the keychain. After I acquire the NSURLCredential object, I’d like to return it back to the Daemon, so it may run the completionHandler with that credential.

However, After I successfully create the NSURLCredential in the user process, and send it back using some reply callback. It looks like the object didn’t serialized properly and I get the following error :

Exception: decodeObjectForKey: Object of class "NSURLCredential" returned nil from -initWithCoder: while being decoded for key <no key>

Here’s my client side code ( I made sure that the server side create a valid NSURLCredential object).
and the problem occur after I send the XPC request, right when i’m about to get the callback response (reply)

- (void)URLSession:(NSURLSession *)session
    didReceiveChallenge:(NSURLAuthenticationChallenge *)challenge
      completionHandler:(void (^)(NSURLSessionAuthChallengeDisposition disposition, NSURLCredential *credential))completionHandler { 
  if (challenge.protectionSpace.authenticationMethod == NSURLAuthenticationMethodClientCertificate) {
    [myXpcService getCertIdentityWithAcceptedIssuers:challenge.protectionSpace.distinguishedNames
                                 withReply:^(NSURLCredential *cred, NSError *error) {
        if (error != nil) {
          completionHandler(NSURLSessionAuthChallengeCancelAuthenticationChallenge, nil);
        } else {
          completionHandler(NSURLSessionAuthChallengeUseCredential, cred);
        }
    }];
}

Perhaps anybody can tell me what did I do wrong here ? Does XPC is capable to pass complex objects like NSURLCredentials ?

thanks !