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Private Cloud Compute Security Guide

(security.apple.com)
398 points djoldman | 1 comments | 06 Nov 24 13:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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solarkraft ◴[06 Nov 24 15:40 UTC] No.42063965[source]▶
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.

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1. abalone ◴[07 Nov 24 17:12 UTC] No.42078582[source]▶
> 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-compu...