---

CFNetwork

CFNetwork is an API for creating, sending, and receiving serialized messages over a network. It is a high-level interface that can be used to set up and maintain a secure SSL or TLS networking session. CFNetwork includes the following security-related components:

• CFHTTP, which you can use to create, serialize, deserialize, and manage HTTP protocol messages. This component lets you add authentication information to a message.

• CFHTTPAuthentication, which applies authentication credentials to challenged HTTP messages.

• CFFTP, which you can use to peform FTP file transfers. This component lets you send passwords to FTP servers.

In addition to the CFNetwork API, you use the CFStream API to create and manage the read and write streams that CFNetwork depends on. You can specify an SSL or TLS protocol version to encrypt and decrypt the data stream. Note that CFReadStream and CFWriteStream are “toll-free bridged” with their Cocoa Foundation counterparts, NSInputStream and NSOutputStream. This means that each Core Foundation type is interchangeable in function or method calls with the corresponding bridged Foundation object, so you can use either C or Objective C interfaces, whichever is most convenient for you.

---