alt Hacker NewsPer that link: I think there's an interesting question about whether a nefarious actor who's infiltrated a cloud provider with physical access to machines that are running signed operating systems, with signed binaries, with TDX remote attestation, and with hardware supply chain verification, has the ability to break the privacy guarantees of a tenant with Apple's sophistication.
Certainly, one could tamper with the hardware, but could one do it in a way that wouldn't get that machine immediately flagged, removed from the routing pool, and told to wipe its memory immediately, by a watchtower (perhaps even the routing layer itself) that runs in a separate secure Apple datacenter?
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>nefarious actor who's infiltrated a cloud provider
Google is buying that compute from xAI aka Musk
Apple could simply be ordered to include a hardware backdoor, and legally be prevented from talking about it. Everything else in the architecture could work exactly the way they claim in the PCC paper.
Why bother with all that cloak and dagger stuff when they can just buy the data? You believe Apple and/or Google isn't selling it? I have some land in Florida I'd like to talk about.
Those datacentres would be in the same position of trust as a VPN provider in that the data must be unencrypted at points in the process.
They could be making it very safe, and the things apple says they are doing would make it as safe as possible, but as a user there is no way of verifying the claims.