How to make an iPhone web app only available to certain iPhones

Question

im making an iPhone web app but only certain people need access to it. whats the best way to make it secure without having to get people to login every time they open it.

could i do something like http://www.domain.com/iphone/index.php?a=1234&b=5678 but make longer strings to make it more secure then on the index.php page get it to check that they all equal the right string?

like: if($_GET["a"] == '1234' and $_GET["b"] == '5678' { echo 'blah' } ...etc etc.

or is there a way to check serial numbers or MAC addresses of the iPhone?

Answer 1

You could do a ip whitelist? Or make them login once, and save a persistent cookie with a session id.

Answer 2

The only way to make a web app available on certain iPhones is to distribute it as ad-hoc . You could use Phonegap which is just html/css/js.

-> http://phonegap.com/

Answer 3

You can use client side ssl certificates to authenticate the device on your web server. testflight is doing that, for example.