AndroidKeystore on 4.1 API

Question

I am using AndroidKeystore as the provider in my current project to store private keys securely. Now I want to make my app available for older Android releases down to 4.1 (API version 16). Therefore I need to find an alternative for the AndroidKeystore but can hardly find any usable solution. Is there any recommendation how to implement/emulate/replace the AndroidKeystore functionality on these older versions?

Additionally the KeyPairGeneratorSpec is available since v18. What would be the correct replacement on older versions?

Answer 1

I finally found a working solution. For Android 4.x there is the Credential Storage service which can hold various secrets. The best description I found so far is here

http://nelenkov.blogspot.de/2012/05/storing-application-secrets-in-androids.html