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Private Cloud Compute Security Guide
- jagrsw 2y agoIf Apple controls the root of trust, like the private keys in the CPU or security processor used to check the enclave (similar to how Intel and AMD do it with SEV-SNP and TDX), then technically, it's a "trust us" situation, since they likely use their own ARM silicon for that? Harder to attack, sure, but no outside validation. Apple's not saying "we can't access your data," just "we're making it way harder for bad guys (and rogue employees) to get at it."
- ozgune 2y ago+1 on your comment. I think having a description of Apple's threat model would help. I was thinking that open source would help with their verifiable privacy promise. Then again, as you've said, if Apple controls the root of trust, they control everything.
- bootsmann 2y agoThey define their threat model in "Anticipating Attacks"
- dagmx 2y agoTheir threat model is described in their white papers. But essentially it is trying to get to the end result of “if someone commandeers the building with the servers, they still can’t compromise the data chain even with physical access”
- skylerwiernik 2y agoI don't think they do. Your phone cryptographically verifies that the software running on the servers is what it says it is, and you can't pull the keys out of the secure enclave. They also had independent auditors go over the whole thing and publish a report. If the chip is disconnected from the system it will dump its keys and essentially erase all data.
- plagiarist 2y agoI don't understand how publishing cryptographic signatures of the software is a guarantee? How do they prove it isn't keeping a copy of the code to make signatures from but actually running a malicious binary?
- dialup_sounds 2y agoThe client will only talk to servers that can prove they're running the same software as the published signatures. https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute/softwarelayering#Cloud-Attestation https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
- warkdarrior 2y agoAnd the servers prove that by relying on a key stored in secure hardware. And that secure hardware is designed by Apple, who has a specific interest in convincing users of that attestation/proof. Do you see the conflict of interest now?
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoHow do you know the root enclave key isn't retained somewhere before it is written? You're still trusting Apple. Key extraction is difficult but not impossible.
- jsheard 2y ago> Key extraction is difficult but not impossible. Refer to the never-ending clown show that is Intels SGX enclave for examples of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions#List_of_SGX_vulnerabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions#List...
- yalogin 2y agoCan you clarify what you mean by retained and written?
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- ant_li0n 2y agoHey can you help me understand what you mean? There's an entry about "Hardware Root of Trust" in that document, but I don't see how that means Apple is avoiding stating, "we can't access your data" - the doc says it's not exportable. "Explain it like I'm a lowly web dev"
- jolan 2y agohttps://x.com/_saagarjha/status/1804130898482466923 https://x.com/_saagarjha/status/1804130898482466923 https://x.com/frogandtoadbook/status/1734575421792920018 https://x.com/frogandtoadbook/status/1734575421792920018
- wutwutwat 2y agoevery entity you hand data to other than yourself is a "trust us" situation
- SheinhardtWigCo 2y agoIt was always "trust us". They make the silicon, and you have no hope of meaningfully reverse engineering it. Plus, iOS and macOS have silent software update mechanisms, and no update transparency.
- abalone 2y ago> Harder to attack, sure, but no outside validation. There is actually a third party auditor involved in certifying hardware integrity prior to deployment.[1] But yes, the goal is to protect against rogue agents and hackers (and software bugs!), not to prove that Apple as an organization has fundamentally designed backdoors into the secure element of their silicon. [1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute/hardwareintegrity https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
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- m3kw9 2y agoI will just use it, it’s Apple and all I need is to see the verifiable privacy thing and I let the researchers let me know red flags. You go on copilot, it says your code is private? Good luck
- danparsonson 2y agoI've got a fully private LLM that's pretty good at coding built right into my head - I'll stick with that, thanks.
- reassess_blind 2y agoSame, but it’s vulnerable to prompt injection among other things.
- z3ncyberpunk 2y agoApple hands your data over to PRISM since 2012.
- talldayo 2y ago> it’s Apple and all I need is to see the verifiable privacy thing and I let the researchers let me know red flags. Oh I've heard of Apple, they're the company that sued Corellium for letting researchers study iPhone security too well. No source code, no accountability.
- solarkraft 2y agoSibling comments point out (and I believe, corrections are welcome) that all that theater is still no protection against Apple themselves, should they want to subvert the system in an organized way. They’re still fully in control. There is, for example, as far as I understand it, still plenty of attack surface for them to run different software than they say they do. What they are doing by this is of course to make any kind of subversion a hell of a lot harder and I welcome that. It serves as a strong signal that they want to protect my data and I welcome that. To me this definitely makes them the most trusted AI vendor at the moment by far.
- patmorgan23 2y agoYep. If you don't trust apple with your data, don't buy a device that runs apples operating system
- yndoendo 2y agoThat is good in theory. Reality, anyone you engage with that uses an Apple device has leaked your content / information to Apple. High confidence that Apple could easily build profiles on people that do not use their devices via this indirect action of having to communicate with Apple devices owners. That statement above also applies to Google. There is now way not prevent indirect data sharing with Apple or Google.
- hnaccount_rng 2y agoYes, if your thread model includes the provider of your operating system, then you cannot win. It's really that simple. You fundamentally need to trust your operating system because it can just lie to you
- fsflover 2y agoThis is false. With FLOSS and reproducible builds, you can rely on the community for verification.
- _boffin_ 2y agoI really don’t care at all about this as the interactions that I’d have would be the speech to text, which sends all transcripts to Apple without the ability opt out.
- max_ 2y ago[flagged]
- jasongill 2y agoThe core of this article, if I understand it correctly, is that macOS pings Apple to make sure that apps you open are safe before opening them. This check contains some sort of unique string about the app being opened, and then there is a big leap to "this could be used by the government" Is this the ideal situation? No, probably not. Should Apple do a better job of communicating that this is happening to users? Yes, probably so. Does Apple already go overboard to explain their privacy settings during setup of a new device (the pages with the blue "handshake" icon)? Yes. Does Apple do a far better job of this than Google or Microsoft (in my opinion)? Yes. I don't think anyone here is claiming that Apple is the best thing to ever happen to privacy, but when viewed via the lens of "the world we live in today", it's hard to see how Apple's privacy stance is a "scam". It seems to me to be one of the best or most reasonable stances for privacy among all large-cap businesses in the world.
- max_ 2y agoHave you read the linked article?
- jasongill 2y agoYes, that's why I commented, because the article's core complaint is about the fact that the OS'es Gatekeeper feature does an OCSP certificate validation whenever an app is launched and there's no way to disable it, and that supposed calling home could leak data about your computer use over the wire. However, it also has a LOT of speculation, with statements like "It seems this is part of Apple’s anti-malware (and perhaps anti-piracy)" and "allowing anyone on the network (which includes the US military intelligence community) to see what apps you’re launching" and "Your computer now serves a remote master, who has decided that they are entitled to spy on you." However, without this feature (which seems pretty benign to me), wouldn't the average macOS user be actually exposed to more potential harm by being able to run untrusted or modified binaries without any warnings?
- jgalt212 2y ago[flagged]
- niek_pas 2y agoThey never actually went through with that, did they?
- ZekeSulastin 2y agoThey indeed shelved the plan {1}, and have also introduced iCloud Advanced Data Protection (their branding for end to end encryption) {2}. There is still the opt-in Communication Safety {3} that tries to interdict sending or receiving media containing nudity if enabled, but Apple doesn’t get notified of any hits (and assuming I’m reading it right the parent doesn’t even get a notification unless the child sends one!). 1: https://archive.ph/x6z0K https://archive.ph/x6z0K (WIRED article) 2: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 (Adv Data Protection) 3: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105069 https://support.apple.com/en-us/105069 (Comm Safety)
- wutwutwat 2y agoComments like this are extremely common on any apple post related to photos and honestly it's pretty sus that you and many others will start complaining about a thing nobody even mentioned, because of the thing you're complaining/concerned/pissed about. That's pretty telling imo and nobody ever calls it out. I'm going to start calling it out.
- gigel82 2y agoI'm glad that more and more people start to see through the thick Apple BS (in these comments). I don't expect them to back down from this but I hope there is enough pushback that they'll be forced to add a big opt-out for all cloud compute, however "private" they make it out to be.
- commandersaki 2y agoYou can disable Apple Intelligence thereby opting out of private cloud compute.
- h1fra 2y agoLove this, but as an engineer, I would hate to get a bug report in that prod environment, 100% don't work on my machine and 0% reproducibility
- slashdave 2y agoThat's a strange point of view. Clearly one shouldn't use private information for testing in any production environment.
- ericlewis 2y agoAs a person who works on this kinda stuff I know what they mean. It’s very hard to debug things totally blind.
- pjmlp 2y agoUsually quite common when doing contract work, where externals have no access to anything besides a sandbox to play around with their contribution to the whole enterprise software jigsaw.
- vtodekl 2y ago[dead]
- lxgr 2y agoThis is probably the best way to do cloud computation offoading, if one chooses to do it at all. What's desperately missing on the client side is a switch to turn this off. It's really intransparent which Apple Intelligence requests are locally processed and which are sent to the cloud, at the moment. The only sure way to know/prevent it a priori is to... enter flight mode, as far as I can tell? Retroactively, there's a request log in the privacy section of System Preferences, but that's really convoluted to read (due to all of the cryptographic proofs that I have absolutely no tools to verify at the moment, and honestly have no interest in).
- saagarjha 2y agoYep, this is the real issue. It is very unclear what gets sent to this thing. And Apple has repeatedly made that distinction very hard to discern.
- curt15 2y agoFor the experts out there, how does this compare with AWS Nitro?
- bobbiechen 2y agoAWS Nitro (and Nitro Enclaves) are general computing platforms, so it's different. You'd need to write a PCC-like system/application on top of AWS Nitro Enclaves to make a direct comparison. A breakdown of those 5 core requirements from Apple: 1. Stateless computation on personal user data - a property of the application 2. Enforceable guarantees - a property of the application; Nitro Enclaves attestation helps here 3. No privileged runtime access - maps directly to the no administrative API access in the AWS Nitro System platform 4. Non-targetability - a property of the application 5. Verifiable transparency - a mix of the application and the platform; Nitro Enclaves attestation helps here To be a little more concrete: (1 stateless) You could write an app that statelessly processes user data, and build it into a Nitro Enclave. This has a particular software measurement (PCR0) and can be code-signed (PCR8) and verified at runtime (2 enforceable) using Nitro Enclave Attestation. This also provides integrity protection. You get (3 no access) for "free" by running it in Nitro to begin with (from AWS - you also need to ensure there is no application-level admin access). You would need to design (4 non-targetable) as part of your application. For (5 transparency), you could provide your code to researchers as Apple is doing. (I work with AWS Nitro Enclaves for various security/privacy use cases at Anjuna. Some of these resemble PCC and I hope we can share more details about the customer use cases eventually.) Some sources: - NCC Group Audit on the Nitro System https://www.nccgroup.com/us/research-blog/public-report-aws-nitro-system-api-security-claims/ https://www.nccgroup.com/us/research-blog/public-report-aws-... - Nitro Enclaves attestation process: https://github.com/aws/aws-nitro-enclaves-nsm-api/blob/main/docs/attestation_process.md https://github.com/aws/aws-nitro-enclaves-nsm-api/blob/main/...
- computerfriend 2y agoI have used some of your employer's software. I do not disagree with your points, but the NCC audit is not compelling. They only interviewed engineers and didn't audit the code or how it is deployed.
- natch 2y ago>No privileged runtime access: PCC must not contain privileged interfaces that might enable Apple site reliability staff to bypass PCC privacy guarantees. What about other staff and partners and other entities? Why do they always insert qualifiers? Edit: Yeah, we know why. But my point is they should spell it out, not use wording that is on its face misleading or outright deceptive.
- pertymcpert 2y agoApple are running the data centers... this seems like an extreme nit pick of language.
- natch 2y agoI thought contractors employed mostly by overseas affiliated staffing firms partnering with IS&T run the data centers, but what do I know. I actually don’t. But the wording is odd. Super weird to take the effort to make the wording so needlessly specific so as to exclude for example government liaison personnel and contractors. Very nit picky of them, to borrow your words. It’s almost as if there’s a reason.
- astrange 2y agoThere aren't any other staff or partners.
- lukev 2y agoThere's something missing from this discussion. What really matters isn't how secure this is on an absolute scale, or how much one can trust Apple. Rather, we should weigh this against what other cloud providers offer. The status quo for every other provider is: "this data is just lying around on our servers. The only thing preventing a employee from accessing it is that it would be a violation of policy (and might be caught in an internal audit.)" Most providers also carve out several cases where they can look at your data, for support, debugging, or analytics purposes. So even though the punchline of "you still need to trust Apple" is technically true, this is qualitatively different because what would need to occur for Apple to break their promises here is so much more drastic. For other services to leak their data, all it takes is for one employee to do something they shouldn't. For Apple, it would require a deliberate compromise of the entire stack at the hardware level. This is very much harder to pull off, and more difficult to hide, and therefore Apple's security posture is qualitatively better than Google, Meta or Microsoft. If you want to keep your data local and trust no-one, sure, fine, then you don't need to trust anyone else at all. But presuming you (a) are going to use cloud services and (b) you care about privacy, Apple has a compelling value proposition.
- harry8 2y ago> Apple has a compelling value proposition. No. Apple has a proposition that /may/ be better than the current alternatives?
- lukev 2y agoIf Apple is doing what they say they are, it is in fact better. No maybe about it. If they’re not, that means they are acting and intentionally deceiving the public security community which they are inviting to audit it. Is that something you actually think is happening? I think we need to be clear here. Your threat model may or may not be covered by the guarantees they are able to document, but just saying “well maybe they’re still doing some unspecified nefarious thing” is not contributing to the discussion. Especially when none of the alternatives are even trying.
- 2y ago
- majestik 2y agoPCC is a highly secure transport system for routing user queries to Siri, which then failover to ChatGPT over the public internet.
- sourcepluck 2y agoDoes anyone have any links to serious security researchers discussing this adversarially or critically? Or, if it's too soon as it's such a recent release, links to the types of serious security researchers who publish that sort of thing. The discussion here would seem to suggest there's definitely a need for such a thing. Bruce Schneier comes to mind, and doing a search of: "cloud" site:https://www.schneier.com/ https://www.schneier.com/ did have a few results. Would be interested in more trustworthy figures to have a read of.