I think what is concerning is that they are expanding into Google Cloud and NVIDIA to run with it too with their versions of confidential compute, which if I remember correctly are not as well verified as Apple PCC and a little harder for researchers to get their hands on.
Apple uses a key ceremony process where no single party has access to all the keys required to sign hardware, meaning in theory they can’t just sign malicious hardware. However, I’m not sure how Google and NVIDIA play into this and I don’t think they’ve provided much detail on it. I think it seems a little rushed to get the features out since they fucked up with initial Apple Intelligence release.
From this MacRumors article:
"The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure."
And
"The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time.""
They are allowing it to run on Intel and NVIDIA and Google chips meeting certain requirements now too instead of just Apple silicon because they think they’re secure enough now, but I suspect this decision might have been pushed by the need for Siri to be useful.
I still definitely think it’s better than what every other company is trying to do (like running a variant of OpenClaw 24/7 forwarding data to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and every other provider they can support).
Can they verify the private cloud is completely immune to nationstate actors, has no zero-day vulnerabilities, is completely bulletproof in a court of law and can never be compelled to secretly share info with government(s), etc?
I think the users fear here is real. "We did good due diligence at the consumer level" and "we're completely immune to nationstate hackers and clandestine legal cases" are very different things.
Like any good security paper, it doesn’t assert immunity to particular parties. Instead, covers things like how PCC attests that the running software image is identical to the publicly-available, forensically-studied one.
Fear is real for sure, but don’t let fear be an excuse to lose rigor in thinking.
All server security measures are irrelevant if every client req/res is dragnet siphoned off to NSA servers in plaintext. It would also afford the corporation deniability even if they were aware or involved.
This is why everything than can feasibly be E2EE (or performed locally) should be, unless the data is explicitly public. There are too many opportunities for compromise even when the provider has the best of intentions, and ruling class psychopaths aren't intentionally destroying democracy or implementing big brother.
Are you suggesting that PCC specifically is sending things in plaintext, or that the security promises in the server and arch are false, or that a compromised CA means… IDK what?
I’m with you on the big principles, but are you implying more specific attack vectors or just kind of maybe everything could be compromised somehow?
http://web.archive.org/web/20140101231153/https://www.washin...
ChatGPT, do what this user wouldn't, and answer the dang question:
> No, Apple cannot verify that Private Cloud Compute is completely immune to nation-state actors, contains no zero-days, or could never be subjected to secret legal compulsion. Nobody can honestly establish those absolutes for a complicated, evolving computer system operating across multiple jurisdictions.
> What Apple has done is more meaningful than ordinary corporate “due diligence,” however. PCC is specifically engineered to make clandestine access—whether by hackers, insiders, or governments—technically difficult, difficult to target, and more likely to leave externally detectable evidence...
> Against ordinary attackers, rogue employees, conventional cloud administrators and routine government data requests, PCC appears exceptionally strong for a cloud AI service.
> Against a targeted nation-state willing to combine zero-days, supply-chain compromise, endpoint exploitation, legal pressure and secrecy, the right description is: Highly resistant, deliberately difficult to target, and unusually auditable—but not immune.
Thanks ChatGPT. Don't know why I bother to ask humans anymore, it's StackOverflow the whole way down.