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What's the deal with iCloud Photos and privacy anyway? I've heard talk of "encrypted at rest" but what does this mean in practice? If someone gets root on Apple
by Osmium 11y ago
What's the deal with iCloud Photos and privacy anyway? I've heard talk of "encrypted at rest" but what does this mean in practice? If someone gets root on Apple's servers, can they see my photos, or only if I'm logged in, or what?
- sitharus 11y agoIt means that unencrypted data is never written to disk. In the case of S3 it means that if someone gains access to your S3 buckets the data is encrypted. Of course if you have root-level access to Apple's servers that read S3 you could find the decryption key, though that might not be an easy task.
- danudey 11y agoNot necessarily. The encryption key could be stored in your iCloud keychain, or derived from your login credentials and/or an account-specific identifier stored on your devices. That would prevent anyone from decrypting your data even with root on their servers unless they managed to capture the decryption key out of memory.
- Osmium 11y agoRight. In principle, it's possible. Apple maintains it can't read your iMessages, for example. And are there any operations that happen on your photos that have to happen in the cloud? Thumbnail generation/optimisation can happen during upload. However, since iCloud Photos has a web interface, I imagine they're not doing this.
- cmdrfred 11y agoIt is mostly a protection in cases where an attacker gains physical access to a system (or dumpster dives hard drives). If they are holding on the the encryption key for you then they can obviously decrypt them. I wouldn't consider it safe for anything important.