Month: August 2020

The programming language Swift was developed by Apple Inc. and first officially launched on 2014. It is a general purpose, compiler programming language intended for its usage on a wide variety of application domain. It has a multi- paradigm feature that attributes it as a protocol oriented, object-oriented, functional, imperative and block structured declarative programming language. It is an intuitive programming language designed for operating systems like macOS, iOS, tvOS, iOS, iPadOS, Linux, watchOS and z/OS. It is mainly designed for Apple’s native API Cocoa, the development framework Cocoa Touch and the object-oriented C codes used widely for various Apple products. It aims in incorporating various Objective-C code features ensuring much wider security factors, which in turn helps the software testers to identify software bugs more easily.

Learning Swift For Ethical Hacking Purposes

Swift is recognized as a ‘powerful’ and fastest growing programming language in the history of technology. The popularity of this language among techies has come from the ‘intuitive’ part which makes Swift an easy to learn and easy to use programming language, even for non-programmers and with minimum technical know-how. The developers find Swift coding to be interactive and fun due to its lucid application of simpler syntaxes that are compact yet demonstrative. New programmers find it friendly and easy to adopt. Swift language is incorporated with modern features that are equally welcoming for the developers and end users using the final product. It is designed in a ‘safe’ format and it is also known to develop softwares that has unmatched operational speed. Whether it is for phone, desktop, servers or any other machine running codes, Swift is a perfect solution for developing APIs for every platform. This is why it is very commonly used in mobile app development. This also makes Swift very good to know for ethical hacking purposes. There are many well known bug bounty programs offered for large mobile app companies. In fact a popular casual dating app called MeetnFuck gave two programmers a reward of $250,000 USD for discovering and exploit and implementing a fix to their Swift coding. Adult apps tend to offer large rewards due to them often being targeted for security and data breaches.

Key Features Supported By Swift Coding

• Swift is closure supportive.
• In Objective-C using of some core strings required method calls, which in Swift has been incorporated in the core language making it easily accessible.
• Five levels of access control are supported by the Swift. The levels are open, public, internal, private and fileprivate.
• An important inclusion in Swift is the usage of option types and using a new keyword ‘guard’ to protect the chaining process.
• Swift allows the usage of objects that has got pass-by-value semantics making it a feature that provides flexibility to the programmers.
• Protocols or more commonly known as interfaces are used in Swift, making it a protocol-oriented programming.
• Easier memory allocation and deallocation with the incorporation of Automatic Reference Counting or ARC memory management.
• Efficient debugging on the development environment for the usage of read-eval-print loop or REPL. The REPL adoption with the Swift playgrounds, has made debugging interactive and hence much easier by responding well with run time debugger changes and codes.
• High performance with safety assurance.

Swift is said to have produced some ground-breaking results combining the best of Apple’s engineering think-tanks and the wide open source of contributors.