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Apple Reportedly Storing Over 8 Million Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers
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mom curious if Apple is doing rigorous audits if data has been mined or attempted to be decrypted or if the data is being copied to non monitored locations, server farms or manually copied and sent off their paid sites?!
Apple has had numerous amounts of their own servers in-house for over a decade (even before the XServe product lineup which of course isn’t used for about as long as well). Surely Amazon is not a good alternative.
Not necessarily. Apple isn't storing data natively on Google Cloud. It's storing chunks of data that are each individually encrypted, with no metadata to identify them. Basically, it's just blobs of encrypted data, as far as Google is concerned. While it's an order of magnitude more complex in terms of Apple's implementation, conceptually it's like creating an encrypted sparse disk image on your Mac.
So, Apple would definitely be able to store IMAP mailboxes on Google Cloud in encrypted form.
That said, however, due to how mail servers work, it's very unlikely that Apple is using any external storage provider for IMAP mailboxes. In fact, there's a good chance all of this is on a completely separate group of servers. Apple also isn't likely storing a ton of email anyway — it's things like iCloud Photo Libraries that likely make up the lion's share of iCloud storage requirements.
Mail can definitely be encrypted "at rest" — that is, when actually written to disk. I would also be very surprised if this is not the case.
However, the nature of IMAP and SMTP that there are points at which it does have to be stored in the clear, at least temporarily, in places like inbound and outbound mail queues.
This is especially true for SMTP, which relies entirely on encrypted mail formats. Messages can be encrypted in transit using SSL technologies, but even this isn't a strict requirement for the SMTP protocol. IMAP is a little trickier, as there's no need to "queue" messages, so it's certainly possible for the data store to be encrypted and messages only decrypted when they're being transferred to Apple Mail or whatever other IMAP client you're using, or rendered in the iCloud Mail web interface. Either way, however, IMAP shouldn't be considered secure, since there are many points at which your message store will be decrypted. At best, any "at rest" encryption is intended to protected against things like raw data spills.
I'm curious if you have a source for this. I have no insight into how Apple stores iCloud Mail data but as I said above, I'd be very surprised if they're not encrypting the data at rest, even if that's just low-level file system encryption.
Further, however, as I noted above, Apple is definitely not storing mail data unencrypted on third-party servers, simply because it doesn't store data there in any kind of native format at all.
I don't imagine it has much need to do so. The data is stored in a very secure and generally unintelligible form in the first place.
From page 125 of Apple's Platform Security Guide (emphasis mine):
In other words, what's being stored are a bunch of file fragments, each encrypted using a unique key (there's no "master key" for anybody to get their hands on), and absolutely no information that would even tie them to a single user, much less allow a specific file to be identified.
There's not even any way of linking the fragments. You could try and decrypt a thousand of them and find that they're all pieces of a thousand different files. Putting a single file back together would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, even if you had every single one of the decryption keys involved — and remember, every single fragment is encrypted with a different key.
In fact, reading carefully, it seems this is also how Apple stores iCloud user data on its own servers too ("using both Apple and third-party storage services"). So, this kind of data isolation exists even in Apple's own data centres, which likely allows it to keep an "inner ring" of extremely high-security servers — the ones that host the iCloud accounts and all of the keys and metadata — without having to worry too much about the security of the other 99% of the data farm.
I think many people get their knowledge of encryption technology from watching too many movies.
Years ago, a locksmith I knew was lamenting how many people think you can open any lock with a hairpin in under 10 seconds just from watching 80's detective movies, and the same thing is true today with encryption technology. People watch movies where the protagonist sits down in front of a highly-encrypted government system, whips off a few keystrokes, and suddenly has access to everything in under a minute. The real world doesn't work that way.
Barring any flaws in the encryption algorithms, strong encryption is very hard to crack, and all of these ideas that Quantum computers can do it an order of magnitude faster are sci-fi level myths right now that also come from TV shows that are more concerned about telling a story than being scientifically accurate.
While Apple only uses AES128, which is theoretically more vulnerable to quantum computing attacks using Grover's algorithm (the NSA began insisting on AES256 for this very reason about seven years ago), it's still more than secure enough against everyday attacks using modern-day processing engines.
Of equal importance, however, is that fact that Apple isn't writing out a native file system on Google cloud and then wrapping it in AES128 encryption with a single SHA256 key. Instead, it's breaking every single file up into multiple fragments, or "chunks" and then encrypting each of those chunks with their own unique key, and storing them with absolutely no identifying metadata.
This means that Google would have to brute-force decrypt many trillions of individual files, all stored using a different key. Then, once it did that, it would have to figure out what to do with all of these unencrypted pieces, since they'd be scattered across over a billion users with no idea of what belongs to what. I'm sure somebody could write an algorithm to help figure that out, but I'm also quite certain that Google and its engineers have far better things to do with their time — even leaving aside the fact that when it comes to the very lucrative cloud storage side of its business, it's not about data harvesting.
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Source? Sure: from Apple's support site: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
Scroll down to the bottom and you'll note that Apple mail is NOT stored in an encrypted manner.
Thanks, and yup, you're right, they state it pretty clearly. Can't believe I missed that 🤦♂️😏
However, that's still only on its own servers — although as I noted earlier, it's very unlikely that Apple is storing iCloud Mail outside of its own servers due to how email systems work. In fact, while Apple's Platform Security Guide doesn't make any specific mention of iCloud Mail, the fact that Apple uses the same chunk-and-encrypt approach for its own internal storage services, yet says that iCloud Mail is not encrypted at rest, suggests that it's either talking about two different levels of encryption, or that iCloud Mail is simply isolated from the rest of the iCloud data storage repositories.
Either way, this is all just speculation — it's impossible to know for sure unless you work for Apple or know somebody who does and is able or willing to talk about it.
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This.
Alphabet is still losing money on their cloud business because they have to be constantly investing in it
Google Cloud vs. AWS: Two vastly different profit pictures
Google Cloud's operating income will improve in 2021, but margins won't approach the ad business anytime soon. Meanwhile, AWS is an operating income hero that subsidizes the profit picture for Amazon as a whole.www.zdnet.com
Alphabet, Google's parent, detailed how much its ad business subsidizes its cloud expansion. In the fourth quarter, Google Cloud, which includes platform, infrastructure, and Workspace, delivered an operating loss of $1.24 billion on revenue of $3.83 billion, up from $2.61 billion a year ago.
Google’s cloud business lost more than $5.5 billion last year, but it’s growing fast
Google’s cloud business made $13 billion last year, but it also took a major loss.www.theverge.com
but what does Google’s loss of their cloud system have anything. To do with how much Apple spends for their services?
mid anything you’ve added to the sentiment that Apple should invert in their own servers/farm.
- Alphabet could choose to outsource their storage needs externally that means double fees for Apple or a suddenly ending contract.
- Alphabet could decide to start charging more. Sure the current contract length may hold until expiry yet how long is the contract for storage? Any fine print that allows end of month price change or cancelling of contract arbitrarily?
Probably nothing. I'm not sure what that post is getting at.
The reality is that Google is operating its cloud storage services at a loss right now because it's trying to break into a market that's very competitive, and was already dominated by Amazon and Microsoft before Google got there.
Not all of Google's Cloud services are particularly cheap, but it's selling many of its more basic ones, like basic compute engines and storage as "loss leaders" to try and get people invested so that when it's time to look to more sophisticated services like database or app engines, they'll be more inclined to but those from Google as well.
This is why Apple's endgame is to have its own data centres, which is what it's doing, but it just seems it can't build them fast enough, so for now it has to rent extra storage from Google. I doubt it's going to do that for any longer than it's going to keep relying on Qualcomm for modem chips.
After all, Apple was already burned by Google once with Maps, resulting in the need to roll out Apple Maps before it was ready. I doubt that Apple is eager to repeat that mistake.
It may not even be that informationally deep. I think many people just make it up as they go ('they don't need the private key, "they" can "hack" anything', for example).
Sooo… google has magic?
Unless google has secretly solved PvsNP and actually created a viable algorithm and chip to leverage it, or is a couple of decades ahead of where they claim to be regarding real quantum computing it’s just not gonna happen.
Apple isn’t stupid, the files hosted by other companies are likely all using randomized file names, split files and strong encryption perhaps even multi layered encryption where there is a common Apple encryption AND a per user encryption.
Just look at the content of an encrypted time machine backup. Can you tell me what files are what? Encryption is not the entirety of security and there are absolutely ways to store data in the cloud where recovery of data via the cloud provider is quite literally impossible.
Even if google wanted to decrypt a users data, there is no way they would know what data to decrypt, which blocks correspond to which users. And that’s assuming they even upload the complete data.
Apple may well split the encrypted files and keep a tiny piece in their own datacenters like the keys. In which case even if google knew the files and key, they STILL couldn’t decrypt it.
The keys are all likely stored in HSMs too.
Edit: and while I was typing someone actually found the documents showing apple is doing exactly what I said above, chunking the data and splitting it apart. Which makes brute forcing nearly impossible because one of the steps of brute forcing is validation, and validating a gibberish file fragment has been decrypted is basically impossible since the success and failure cases both would result in outputting gibberish.
There is not a single supercomputer which enough power and storage to brute force and store every single chunk and then iterate through every possible permutation of those chunks until they create valid files. A single file may well end up with a 100 parts, even if there were just 100 files being stored, that means you would need to compute 100 * 100 * 2^128 different permutations. As a reminded 2^128 ~340 trillion trillion trillion already… adding 4 0s just makes it worse AND there are WAY more than 100 files.
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Who has one of the largest quantum computer that could solve difficult cryptography tasks in seconds?
