6 ms·

Sibling comments point out (and I believe, corrections are welcome) that all that theater is still no protection against Apple themselves, should they want to s

Sibling 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 ago
Yep. If you don't trust apple with your data, don't buy a device that runs apples operating system
- yndoendo 2y ago
  That 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 ago
    Yes, 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 ago
      This is false. With FLOSS and reproducible builds, you can rely on the community for verification.
      - philjohn 2y ago
        Not unless your entire stack down to the bare silicon is also FLOSS, and the community is able to verify. There is a lot of navel gazing in these comments about "the perfect solution", but we all know (or should know) that perfect is the enemy of good enough.
        threeseed 2y ago
        We've seen countless examples of relatively minor libraries being exploited which then cause havoc because of a spider web of transitive dependencies.
        fsflover 2y ago
        On Qubes OS (my daily driver), which runs everrything in VMs with strong, hardware virtualization, you can use minimal operating systems with very low number of installed libraries for security-critical actions: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal/ https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal/
        fsflover 2y ago
        > Not unless your entire stack down to the bare silicon is also FLOSS, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
      - hnaccount_rng 2y ago
        You really cannot. Both from a practical point of view. Does the thing really does what _you_ want it to do? A typical OS is much too complicated to verify this (and no theorem provers just move the problem). But also from a theoretical point of view: I give you that the source does what you want it to do (again: unrealistic). Then you still need to verify that the software deployed is the software that builds reproducibly from the source. At the end of the day you do that by getting some string of bits from some safe place and compare it to a string of bits that your software hands you. That "your software" thing can just lie! And yes you can make that more complicated (using crypto to sign things etc.), but that just increases the complexity of the believable lie. But if your thread model is "I do not trust my phone manufacturer" than this is enough. In practice that's never the thread model though.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      > You fundamentally need to trust your operating system because it can just lie to you Trust us, we are liars. /s
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago
    Define "content / information".
  - afh1 2y ago
    Depending on your social circle such exposure is not so hard to avoid. Maybe you cannot avoid it entirely but it may be low enough that it doesn't matter. I have older relatives with basically zero online presence.
- isodev 2y ago
  That really is not a valid argument, since Apple have grown to be "the phone". Also, many are unaware or unable to make the determination who or what will own their data before purchasing a device. One only accepts the privacy policy after one taps sign in... and is it really practical to expect people to do this by themselves when buying a phone? That's why regulation needs to step-in and enforce the right decisions are present by default.
- mossTechnician 2y ago
  But if you don't trust Google with your data, you can buy a device that runs Google's operating system, from Google, and flash somebody else's operating system onto it. Or, if you prefer, you can just look at Google's code and verify that the operating system you put on your phone is made with the code you looked at.
- threeseed 2y ago
  And if you don't trust Apple with your data you shouldn't use a phone or internet at all. Because as someone who has worked at a few telcos I can assure you that your phone and triangulated location data is stored, analysed and provided to intelligence agencies. And likewise this would be applying to ISPs.
chadsix 2y ago
Exactly. You can only trust yourself [1] and should self host. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_JyDvBbZ6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_JyDvBbZ6Q
- 9dev 2y ago
  That is an answer for an incredibly tiny fraction of the population. I'm not so much concerned about myself than society in general, and self-hosting just is not a viable solution to the problem at hand.
  - chadsix 2y ago
    To be fair, it's much easier than one can imagine (try ollama on macOS for example). In the end, Apple wrote a lot of longwinded text, but the summary is "you have to trust us." I don't trust Apple - in fact, even the people we trust the most have told us soft lies here and there. Trust is a concept like an integral - you can only get to "almost" and almost is 0. So you can only trust yourself. Period.
    - dotancohen 2y ago
      I don't even trust myself, I know that I'm going to mess up at some point or another.
    - lukev 2y ago
      The odds that I make a mistake in my security configuration are much higher than the odds that Apple is maliciously backdooring themselves. The PCC model doesn't guarantee they can't backdoor themselves, but it does make it more difficult for them.
      - astrange 2y ago
        You also don't have a security team and Apple does have one.
        2y ago
tw04 2y ago
As soon as you start going down the rabbit hole of state sponsored supply chain alteration, you might as well just stop the conversation. There's literally NOTHING you can do to stop that specific attack vector. History has shown, at least to date, Apple has been a good steward. They're as good a vendor to trust as anyone. Given a huge portion of their brand has been built on "we don't spy on you" - the second they do they lose all credibility, so they have a financial incentive to keep protecting your data.
- talldayo 2y ago
  ...in certain places: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754 https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754 Just make absolutely sure you trust your government when using an iDevice.
  - jayrot 2y ago
    >Just make absolutely sure you trust your government This sentence stings right now. :-(
  - spondyl 2y ago
    When it comes to China, it's not entirely fair to single out Apple here given that non-Chinese companies are not allowed to run their own compute in China directly. It always has to be operated by a sponsor in the state who hold encryption keys and do actual deployments etc etc. The same applies to Azure/AWS/Google Cloud's China regions and any other compute services you might think of.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      It's entirely fair. Apple had the choice to stop pursuing business in China if they felt it conflicted with values they prioritized. Evidently it doesn't, which should tell you a lot about how accepting Apple is of this behavior worldwide.
      - musictubes 2y ago
stavros 2y ago
> that all that theater is still no protection against Apple themselves There is such a thing as threat modeling. The fact that your model only stops some threats, and not all threats, doesn't mean that it's theater.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > The fact that your model only stops some threats, and not all threats, doesn't mean that it's theater. Well, to be honest, theater is a pretentious word in this context. A better word will be shitshow. (i never heard of a firewall that claims it filters _some_ packets, or an antivirus that claims that it protects against _some_ viruses)
  - stavros 2y ago
    Really? Please show me an antivirus that claims that it protects against all viruses. A firewall that filters all packets is a pair of scissors.
  - consteval 2y ago
    > i never heard of a firewall that claims it filters _some_ packets, or an antivirus that claims that it protects against _some_ viruses What? That's all of them. Every single one. If they say otherwise, then you're being lied to.
halJordan 2y ago
Its not that they couldn't, its that they couldn't without a watcher knowing. And frankly this tradeoff is not new, nor is it unacceptable in anything other than "Muh Apple"
isodev 2y ago
Indeed, the attestation process, as described by the article, is more geared towards unauthorized exfiltration of information or injection of malicious code. However, "authorized" activities are fully supported where that means signed by Apple. So, ultimately, users need to trust that Apple is doing the right thing, just like any other company. And yes, it means they can be forced (by law) not to do the right thing.
natch 2y ago
You're getting taken in by a misdirection. >for them to run different software than they say they do. They don't even need to do that. They don't need to do anything different than they say. They already are saying only that the data is kept private from <insert very limited subset of relevant people here>. That opens the door wide for them to share the data with anyone outside of that very limited subset. You just have to read what they say, and also read between the lines. They aren't going to say who they share with, apparently, but they are going to carefully craft what they say so that some people get misdirected.
- astrange 2y ago
  They're not doing that because it's obviously illegal. GDPR forbids sharing data with unknown other people.
  - natch 2y ago
    Unknown to whom?
    - astrange 2y ago
      To you.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"Sibling 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." It stands to reason that that control is a prerequisite for "security". Apple does not delegate its own "security" to someone else, a "steward". Hmmm. Yet it expects computer users to delegate control to Apple. Apple is not alone in this regard. It's common for "Big Tech", "security researchers" and HN commenters to advocate for the computer user to delegate control to someone else.
derefr 2y ago
The "we've given this code to a third party to host and run" part can be a 100% effective stop to any Apple-internal shenanigans. It depends entirely on what the third party is legally obligated to do for them. (Or more specifically, what they're legally obligated to not do for them.) A simple example of the sort of legal agreement I'm talking about, is a trust. A trust isn't just a legal entity that takes custody of some assets and doles them out to you on a set schedule; it's more specifically a legal entity established by legal contract, and executed by some particular law firm acting as its custodian, that obligates that law firm as executor to provide only a certain "API" for the contract's subjects/beneficiaries to interact with/manage those assets — a more restrictive one than they would have otherwise had a legal right to. With trusts, this is done because that restrictive API (the "you can't withdraw the assets all at once" part especially) is what makes the trust a trust, legally; and therefore what makes the legal (mostly tax-related) benefits of trusts apply, instead of the trust just being a regular holding company. But you don't need any particular legal impetus in order to create this kind of "hold onto it and don't listen to me if I ask for it back" contract. You can just... write a contract that has terms like that; and then ask a law firm to execute that contract for you. Insofar as Apple have engaged with some law firm to in turn engage with a hosting company; where the hosting company has obligations to the law firm to provide a secure environment for the law firm to deploy software images, and to report accurate trusted-compute metrics to the law firm; and where the law firm is legally obligated to get any image-updates Apple hands over to them independently audited, and only accept "justifiable" changes (per some predefined contractual definition of "justifiable") — then I would say that this is a trustworthy arrangement. Just like a trust is a trust-worthy arrangement.
- neongreen 2y ago
  This actually sounds like a very neat idea. Do you know any services / software companies that operate like that?
commandersaki 2y ago
> 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. But any such software must be publicly verifiable otherwise it cannot be deemed secure. That's why they publish each version in a transparency log which is verified by the client and handwavy verified by public brains trust. This is also just a tired take. The same thing could be said about passcodes on their mobile products or full disk encryption keys for the Mac line. There'd be massive loss of goodwill and legal liability if they subverted these technologies that they claim to make their devices secure.
johnklos 2y ago
Add to this that the only true deterrent to any company these days is the loss of money, and we have a pretty air tight case here. If Apple were seen to be subverting privacy at all, they'd lose literally tens of billions of dollars of revenue because they would no longer be a "premium" brand with offerings that truly differentiate themselves from every Android provider. I trust that no company of that size would risk the most important thing that differentiates themselves from the whole rest of the world for the purpose of spying, making profit from tracking and advertisements, et cetera.
abalone 2y ago
> 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. I would not say "plenty." The protocol that clients use to connect to a PCC node leverages code signing to verify the node is running an authentic, published binary. That code signing is backed by the secure element in Apple's custom hardware (and is part of the reason PCC can only run on this custom hardware, never third party clouds). So to attack this you'd really have to attack the hardware root of trust. Apple details the measures they take here.[1] Having said that, it would be a mistake to assume Apple is trying to cryptographically prove that Apple is not a fundamentally malicious actor that has designed a system to trick you. That's not the goal here. What they are providing a high level of guarantee for is that your data is safe from things like a rogue internal actor, a critical software vulnerability, an inadvertent debug log data leak, or a government subpoena. That's a huge step forward and nowhere near what other architectures can guarantee in an independently verifiable way. [1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute/hardwareintegrity https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
netdevnet 2y ago
The vendor will always be in control. Worth knowing but feels a bit of an empty statement (like water is wet)

patmorgan23 2y ago

Yep. If you don't trust apple with your data, don't buy a device that runs apples operating system

yndoendo 2y ago
That 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    This is false. With FLOSS and reproducible builds, you can rely on the community for verification.
    - philjohn 2y ago
      Not unless your entire stack down to the bare silicon is also FLOSS, and the community is able to verify. There is a lot of navel gazing in these comments about "the perfect solution", but we all know (or should know) that perfect is the enemy of good enough.
      - threeseed 2y ago
        We've seen countless examples of relatively minor libraries being exploited which then cause havoc because of a spider web of transitive dependencies.
        fsflover 2y ago
        On Qubes OS (my daily driver), which runs everrything in VMs with strong, hardware virtualization, you can use minimal operating systems with very low number of installed libraries for security-critical actions: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal/ https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/minimal/
      - fsflover 2y ago
        > Not unless your entire stack down to the bare silicon is also FLOSS, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
    - hnaccount_rng 2y ago
      You really cannot. Both from a practical point of view. Does the thing really does what _you_ want it to do? A typical OS is much too complicated to verify this (and no theorem provers just move the problem). But also from a theoretical point of view: I give you that the source does what you want it to do (again: unrealistic). Then you still need to verify that the software deployed is the software that builds reproducibly from the source. At the end of the day you do that by getting some string of bits from some safe place and compare it to a string of bits that your software hands you. That "your software" thing can just lie! And yes you can make that more complicated (using crypto to sign things etc.), but that just increases the complexity of the believable lie. But if your thread model is "I do not trust my phone manufacturer" than this is enough. In practice that's never the thread model though.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > You fundamentally need to trust your operating system because it can just lie to you Trust us, we are liars. /s
- dialup_sounds 2y ago
  Define "content / information".
- afh1 2y ago
  Depending on your social circle such exposure is not so hard to avoid. Maybe you cannot avoid it entirely but it may be low enough that it doesn't matter. I have older relatives with basically zero online presence.
isodev 2y ago
That really is not a valid argument, since Apple have grown to be "the phone". Also, many are unaware or unable to make the determination who or what will own their data before purchasing a device. One only accepts the privacy policy after one taps sign in... and is it really practical to expect people to do this by themselves when buying a phone? That's why regulation needs to step-in and enforce the right decisions are present by default.
mossTechnician 2y ago
But if you don't trust Google with your data, you can buy a device that runs Google's operating system, from Google, and flash somebody else's operating system onto it. Or, if you prefer, you can just look at Google's code and verify that the operating system you put on your phone is made with the code you looked at.
threeseed 2y ago
And if you don't trust Apple with your data you shouldn't use a phone or internet at all. Because as someone who has worked at a few telcos I can assure you that your phone and triangulated location data is stored, analysed and provided to intelligence agencies. And likewise this would be applying to ISPs.

chadsix 2y ago

Exactly. You can only trust yourself [1] and should self host. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_JyDvBbZ6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_JyDvBbZ6Q

9dev 2y ago
That is an answer for an incredibly tiny fraction of the population. I'm not so much concerned about myself than society in general, and self-hosting just is not a viable solution to the problem at hand.
- chadsix 2y ago
  To be fair, it's much easier than one can imagine (try ollama on macOS for example). In the end, Apple wrote a lot of longwinded text, but the summary is "you have to trust us." I don't trust Apple - in fact, even the people we trust the most have told us soft lies here and there. Trust is a concept like an integral - you can only get to "almost" and almost is 0. So you can only trust yourself. Period.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    I don't even trust myself, I know that I'm going to mess up at some point or another.
  - lukev 2y ago
    The odds that I make a mistake in my security configuration are much higher than the odds that Apple is maliciously backdooring themselves. The PCC model doesn't guarantee they can't backdoor themselves, but it does make it more difficult for them.
    - astrange 2y ago
      You also don't have a security team and Apple does have one.
      - 2y ago

tw04 2y ago

As soon as you start going down the rabbit hole of state sponsored supply chain alteration, you might as well just stop the conversation. There's literally NOTHING you can do to stop that specific attack vector. History has shown, at least to date, Apple has been a good steward. They're as good a vendor to trust as anyone. Given a huge portion of their brand has been built on "we don't spy on you" - the second they do they lose all credibility, so they have a financial incentive to keep protecting your data.

talldayo 2y ago
...in certain places: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754 https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754 Just make absolutely sure you trust your government when using an iDevice.
- jayrot 2y ago
  >Just make absolutely sure you trust your government This sentence stings right now. :-(
- spondyl 2y ago
  When it comes to China, it's not entirely fair to single out Apple here given that non-Chinese companies are not allowed to run their own compute in China directly. It always has to be operated by a sponsor in the state who hold encryption keys and do actual deployments etc etc. The same applies to Azure/AWS/Google Cloud's China regions and any other compute services you might think of.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    It's entirely fair. Apple had the choice to stop pursuing business in China if they felt it conflicted with values they prioritized. Evidently it doesn't, which should tell you a lot about how accepting Apple is of this behavior worldwide.
    - musictubes 2y ago

stavros 2y ago

> that all that theater is still no protection against Apple themselves There is such a thing as threat modeling. The fact that your model only stops some threats, and not all threats, doesn't mean that it's theater.

hulitu 2y ago
> The fact that your model only stops some threats, and not all threats, doesn't mean that it's theater. Well, to be honest, theater is a pretentious word in this context. A better word will be shitshow. (i never heard of a firewall that claims it filters _some_ packets, or an antivirus that claims that it protects against _some_ viruses)
- stavros 2y ago
  Really? Please show me an antivirus that claims that it protects against all viruses. A firewall that filters all packets is a pair of scissors.
- consteval 2y ago
  > i never heard of a firewall that claims it filters _some_ packets, or an antivirus that claims that it protects against _some_ viruses What? That's all of them. Every single one. If they say otherwise, then you're being lied to.

halJordan 2y ago

Its not that they couldn't, its that they couldn't without a watcher knowing. And frankly this tradeoff is not new, nor is it unacceptable in anything other than "Muh Apple"

isodev 2y ago

Indeed, the attestation process, as described by the article, is more geared towards unauthorized exfiltration of information or injection of malicious code. However, "authorized" activities are fully supported where that means signed by Apple. So, ultimately, users need to trust that Apple is doing the right thing, just like any other company. And yes, it means they can be forced (by law) not to do the right thing.

natch 2y ago

You're getting taken in by a misdirection. >for them to run different software than they say they do. They don't even need to do that. They don't need to do anything different than they say. They already are saying only that the data is kept private from <insert very limited subset of relevant people here>. That opens the door wide for them to share the data with anyone outside of that very limited subset. You just have to read what they say, and also read between the lines. They aren't going to say who they share with, apparently, but they are going to carefully craft what they say so that some people get misdirected.

astrange 2y ago
They're not doing that because it's obviously illegal. GDPR forbids sharing data with unknown other people.
- natch 2y ago
  Unknown to whom?
  - astrange 2y ago
    To you.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"Sibling 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." It stands to reason that that control is a prerequisite for "security". Apple does not delegate its own "security" to someone else, a "steward". Hmmm. Yet it expects computer users to delegate control to Apple. Apple is not alone in this regard. It's common for "Big Tech", "security researchers" and HN commenters to advocate for the computer user to delegate control to someone else.

derefr 2y ago

The "we've given this code to a third party to host and run" part can be a 100% effective stop to any Apple-internal shenanigans. It depends entirely on what the third party is legally obligated to do for them. (Or more specifically, what they're legally obligated to not do for them.) A simple example of the sort of legal agreement I'm talking about, is a trust. A trust isn't just a legal entity that takes custody of some assets and doles them out to you on a set schedule; it's more specifically a legal entity established by legal contract, and executed by some particular law firm acting as its custodian, that obligates that law firm as executor to provide only a certain "API" for the contract's subjects/beneficiaries to interact with/manage those assets — a more restrictive one than they would have otherwise had a legal right to. With trusts, this is done because that restrictive API (the "you can't withdraw the assets all at once" part especially) is what makes the trust a trust, legally; and therefore what makes the legal (mostly tax-related) benefits of trusts apply, instead of the trust just being a regular holding company. But you don't need any particular legal impetus in order to create this kind of "hold onto it and don't listen to me if I ask for it back" contract. You can just... write a contract that has terms like that; and then ask a law firm to execute that contract for you. Insofar as Apple have engaged with some law firm to in turn engage with a hosting company; where the hosting company has obligations to the law firm to provide a secure environment for the law firm to deploy software images, and to report accurate trusted-compute metrics to the law firm; and where the law firm is legally obligated to get any image-updates Apple hands over to them independently audited, and only accept "justifiable" changes (per some predefined contractual definition of "justifiable") — then I would say that this is a trustworthy arrangement. Just like a trust is a trust-worthy arrangement.

neongreen 2y ago
This actually sounds like a very neat idea. Do you know any services / software companies that operate like that?

commandersaki 2y ago

> 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. But any such software must be publicly verifiable otherwise it cannot be deemed secure. That's why they publish each version in a transparency log which is verified by the client and handwavy verified by public brains trust. This is also just a tired take. The same thing could be said about passcodes on their mobile products or full disk encryption keys for the Mac line. There'd be massive loss of goodwill and legal liability if they subverted these technologies that they claim to make their devices secure.

johnklos 2y ago

Add to this that the only true deterrent to any company these days is the loss of money, and we have a pretty air tight case here. If Apple were seen to be subverting privacy at all, they'd lose literally tens of billions of dollars of revenue because they would no longer be a "premium" brand with offerings that truly differentiate themselves from every Android provider. I trust that no company of that size would risk the most important thing that differentiates themselves from the whole rest of the world for the purpose of spying, making profit from tracking and advertisements, et cetera.

abalone 2y ago

> 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. I would not say "plenty." The protocol that clients use to connect to a PCC node leverages code signing to verify the node is running an authentic, published binary. That code signing is backed by the secure element in Apple's custom hardware (and is part of the reason PCC can only run on this custom hardware, never third party clouds). So to attack this you'd really have to attack the hardware root of trust. Apple details the measures they take here.[1] Having said that, it would be a mistake to assume Apple is trying to cryptographically prove that Apple is not a fundamentally malicious actor that has designed a system to trick you. That's not the goal here. What they are providing a high level of guarantee for is that your data is safe from things like a rogue internal actor, a critical software vulnerability, an inadvertent debug log data leak, or a government subpoena. That's a huge step forward and nowhere near what other architectures can guarantee in an independently verifiable way. [1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute/hardwareintegrity https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

netdevnet 2y ago

The vendor will always be in control. Worth knowing but feels a bit of an empty statement (like water is wet)