Security research on Private Cloud Compute

The technologies Apple PCC is using has real benefits and is most certainly not "all smoke and mirrors". Reproducible builds, remote attestation and transparency logging are individually useful, and the combination of them even more so.

As for the likelihood of Apple launching Apple PCC to redirect attention from backdoors in their silicon, that seems extremely unlikely. We can debate how unlikely, but there are many far more likely explanations. One is that Apple PCC is simply good business. It'll likely reduce security costs for Apple, and strengthen the perception that Apple respects users' privacy.

> when registers r0-rN are set to values [A, ..., N] and a jump to address 0xCONSTANT occurs

I would recommend something more deniable, or at the very least something that can't easily be replayed. Put a challenge-response in there, or attack the TRNG. It is trivial to make a stream of bytes appear random while actually being deterministic. Such an attack would be more deniable, while also allowing a passive network attacker to read all user data. No need to get code execution on the machines.

On top of which, your comment is a complete non-sequitur to the topic at hand. You could reply with this take to literally any security/privacy related thread.

Great question. Most hardware projects I've seen that market themselves as open source hardware provide the schematic and PCB design, but still use ICs that are proprietary. One of my companies, Tillitis, uses an FPGA as the main IC, and we provide the hardware design configured on the FPGA. Still, the FPGA itself is proprietary.

Another aspect to consider is whether you can audit and modify the design artefacts with open source tooling. If the schematics and PCB design is stored in a proprietary format I'd say that's slightly less open source hardware than if the format was KiCad EDA, which is open source. Similarly, in order to configure the HDL onto the FPGA, do you need to use 50 GB of proprietary Xilinx tooling, or can you use open tools for synthesis, place-and-route, and configuration? That also affects the level of openness in my opinion.

We can ask similar questions of open source software. People who run a Linux distribution typically don't compile packages themselves. If those packages are not reproducible from source, in what sense is the binary open source? It seems we consider it to be open source software because someone we trust claimed it was built from open source code.

The real value of this system is that Apple is making legally enforceable claims about their system. Shareholders can, and do, sue companies that make inaccurate claims about their infrastructure.

I’m 100% sure that Apple’s massive legal team would never let this kind of program exist if _they_ weren’t also confident in these claims. And a legal team at Apple certainly has both internal and external obligations to verify these claims.

America’s legal system is in my opinion what allows the US to dominate economically, creating virtuous cycles like this.

So unless they offer a way for us to run the "cloud services" on our own hardware where we can strictly monitor and firewall all network activity, they are almost guaranteed to be misusing that data, especially given Apple's proven track record of giving in to government's demands for data access (see China).