Security research on Private Cloud Compute
security.apple.com
security.apple.com
The benefits of transparent systems are likely considerable. The combination of reproducible builds, remote attestation and transparency logging allows trivial detection of a range of supply chain attacks. It can allow users to retroactively audit the source code of remote running systems. Yes, there are attacks that the threat model doesn't protect against. That doesn't mean it isn't immensely useful.
Interesting. Please elaborate.
Here's how I see it.
Reproducible builds: I think we'll eventually see Linux distributions like Debian make reproducible builds mandatory by enforcing it in apt-get's trust policy. The trust policy could be expressed as "I will only trust .deb packages where their build hash and source hash are signed by three different build pipelines I trust".
Remote attestation: If you ensure that the server's CPU SoC and the TPM have different supply chains, you could construct a protocol where the supply chain attacker would have to own both supply chains in order to impersonate the server.
Transparency logging: One of the projects I've been working on for the past four years is Sigsum (sigsum.org). It is a transparency log with distributed trust assumptions. Our goal was to figure out the essence of transparency logging technology, identify the most significant design parameters, and for each parameter minimise the attack surface. You'll find the threat model on our website.
Here's a recent presentation by my colleague Rasmus on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp23yQxYm2c
Here's a recent presentation by me on the subject of system transparency / runtime transparency / the technology underlying Apple PCC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo0gxBWwwQE
ironically when talking about losing control of cloud compute.
At least according to what we publicly know, no other backend Apple services follow this model.
Of course, this limits the potential attackers to 1) exactly one government (or N number of eyes) or 2) one company, but there's really no way that you can trust remote hardware.
This _does_ increase the trust that the VMs are safe from other attackers, but I guess this depends on your threat model.
FPGAs can help with this. They allow you to inspect the HDL, synthesize it and configure it onto the FPGA chip yourself. The FPGA chip is still proprietary, but by using an FPGA you are making certain supply chain attacks harder.
We don't, but using an FPGA can make supply chain attacks harder.
Let's assume you have a chip design for a microcontroller and you do a tapeout, i.e. you have chips made. An attacker in your supply chain might attack your chip design before the design makes it to the fab, maybe the attacker is at the fab, or they change out the chips after you've placed them on your PCB.
If you use an FPGA, your customer could stress test the chip by configuring a variety of designs onto the FPGA. These designs should stress test timing, compute and memory at the very least. This requires the attacker's chip to perform at least as well as the FPGA you're using, while still having the same footprint. An attacker might stack the real FPGA die on top of the attacker's die, but such an attack is much easier to detect than a few malicious gates on a die. As for covertly gathering or manipulating data, on an FPGA you can choose where to place your cores. That makes it harder for the attacker to predict where on the FPGA substrate they should place probes, or which gates to attack in order to attack your TRNG, or your master key memory. Those are just some examples.
If you're curious about this type of technology or line of thinking you can check out the website of one of my companies: tillitis.se
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.
We can play this game all the way down.
So at some point you have no option but to trust something/someone
I realise now that you were probably responding to "This _does_ increase the trust that the VMs are safe from other attackers".
The system is protecting you against Apple employees, but not against law enforcement.
No matter how much layer of technology you put, at the end of the day, the US companies have to respect the law of the US.
The requests can be routed to specific investigation / debugging / beta nodes.
Just to turn-on a flag on specific users.
It's not like ultimate privacy, but at least it will prevent Apple engineers from snooping into private chatlogs.
(like some pervert at Gmail was stalking a little girl https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5637234/gcreep-google-enginee... , or Zuckerberg himself reading chatlogs https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/03/mark-zuckerberg-alle... )
Doesn't make the possible threat less real (see recent news in Lebanon), but that story in particular seems to have not stood up to closer inquiry.
This has not been corroborated and Bloomberg has not produced any supporting evidence.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
> The requests can be routed to specific investigation / debugging / beta nodes.
No, this is not possible with the design of PCC; they can't control how your requests are routed and there cannot be nodes with extra debugging.
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.
Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, it is an excellent example that proves the existence of silicon vulnerabilities that allow privilege escalation. Who knows whether it was left there intentionally or not, and if so by whom.
I was primarily arguing that (1) the technologies of Apple PCC are useful and (2) it is _very_ unlikely that Apple PCC is a ploy by Apple, to direct attention away from backdoors in the silicon.
20231229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38801275 Kaspersky discloses iPhone hardware feature vital in Operation Triangulation
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.
37C3 - Operation Triangulation: What You Get When Attack iPhones of Researchers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f6YyH62jFE
Absolutely insane attack. Really opens your eyes on what nation-state attackers are capable of.
Let's assume Apple has been compromised in some way and releases new chips with a backdoor. It's expensive to insert extra logic into just one particular spin of a chip; that involves extra tooling cost that would be noticeable line-items and show up in discovery were Apple to be sued about their false claims. So it needs to be on all the chips, not just a specific "defeat PCC" spin of their silicon. So they'd be shipping iPads and iPhones with hardware backdoors.
What happens when those backdoors inevitably leak? Well, now you have a trivial jailbreak vector that Apple can't patch. Apple's security model could be roughly boiled down as "our DRM is your security"; while they also have lots of actual security, they pride themselves on the fact that they have an economic incentive to lock the system down to keep both bad actors and competing app stores out. So if this backdoor was inserted without the knowledge of Apple management, there are going to be heads rolling. And if it was, then they're going to be sued up the ass once people realize the implications of such a thing, because Tim Cook went up on stage and promised everyone they were building servers that would refuse to let them read your Siri queries.
>backdoors inevitably leak? Well, now you have a trivial jailbreak vector
You can hold the enter key down for 40 seconds to login into any certain Linux Server distro, for years. No one knew, ez to do.
You can have a chip inside your chip that only accepts encrypted and signed microcode and has control over the superior chip. Everyone knows - nothing you can do.
Nation state actors however, can facilitate either; APT's can forge fake digital forensics that imply another motive/state/false flag.
All remote attestation technology is rooted by a PKI (the DCA certificate authority in this case). There's some data somewhere that simply asserts that a particular key was generated inside a CPU, and everything is chained off that. There's currently no good way to prove this step so you just have to take it on faith. Forge such an assertion and you can sign statements that device X is actually a Y and it's game over, it's not detectable remotely.
Therefore, you must take on faith the organization providing the root of trust i.e. the CPU. No way around it. Apple does the best it can within this constraint by trying to have numerous employees be involved, and there's this third party auditor they hired, but that auditor is ultimately engaging in a process controlled by Apple. It's a good start but the whole thing assumes either that Apple employees will become whistleblowers if given a sufficiently powerful order, or that the third party auditor will be willing and able to shut down Apple Intelligence if they aren't satisfied with the audit. Given Apple's legal resources and famously leak-proof operation, is this a convincing proposition?
Conventional confidential computing conceptually works, because the people designing and selling the CPUs are different to the people deploying them to run confidential workloads. The deployers can't forge an attestation (assuming absence of bugs) because they don't have access to the root signing keys. The CPU makers could, theoretically, but they have no reason to because they aren't running any confidential workloads so there's no data to steal. And they are in practice constrained by basic problems like not knowing what CPU the deployers actually have, not being able to force changes to other people's hardware, not being able to intercept the network connections and so on.
So you need a higher authority that can force them to conspire which in practice means only the US government.
In this case, Apple is doing everything right except that the root of trust for everything is Apple itself. They can publish in their log an entry that claims to be an Apple CPU but for which the key was generated outside of the manufacturing process, and that's all it takes to dismantle the entire architecture. Apple know this and are doing the best they can within the "don't team up with competitors" constraint they obviously are placed under. But trust is ultimately a human thing and the purpose of corporations is to let us abstract and to some extent anthropomorphize large groups. So I'm not totally sure this works, socially.
> simply asserts that a particular key was generated inside a CPU ... There's currently no good way to prove this step
Yes, but there are better and worse ways to do it. Here's how I think about it. I know you know some of this but I'll write it out for other HN readers as well.
Let's start with the supply chain for an SoC's master key. A master key that only uses entropy from an on-die PUF is vulnerable to mistakes and attacks on the chip design as well as the process technology. A master key memory on-die which is provisioned by the fab, or during packaging, or by the eventual buyer of the SoC, is vulnerable to mistakes and attack during that provisioning step.
I think state-of-the-art would be something like:
- an on-die key memory, where the storage is in the vias, using antifuse technology that prevents readout of the bits using x-ray,
- provisioned using multiple entropy source controlled by different supply chains such as (1) an on-die PUF, (2) an on-die TRNG, (3) an off-die TRNG controlled by the eventual buyer,
- provisioned by the eventual buyer and not earlier
As for the cryptographic remote attestation claim itself, such as a TPM Quote, that doesn't have to be only one signature.
As for detectability, discoverability and deterrence, transparency logs makes targeted attacks discoverable. By tlogging all relevant cryptographic claims, including claims related to inventory and provisioning of master keys, an attacker would have to circumvent quite a lot of safeguards to remain undetected.
Finally, if we assume that the attacker is actually at Apple - management, a team, a disgruntled employee, saboteurs employed by competitors - what this type of architecture does is it forces the attacker to make explicit claims that are more easily falsifiable than without such an architecture. And multiple people need to conspire in order for an attack to succeed.
Let's agree that Apple are doing state-of-the-art work in terms of internal manufacturing controls and making those auditable. I think actually the more interesting and tricky part is how to manage software evolution. This is something I've brought up with [potential] customers in the past when working with them on SGX related projects: for this to make sense, socially, then there has to be a third party audit for not only the software in the abstract but each version of the software. And that really needs to be enforced by the client, which means, every change to the software needs to be audited. This is usually a non-starter for most companies because they're afraid it'd kill velocity, so for my own experiments I looked at in-process sandboxing and the like to try and restrict the TCB even within the remotely attested address space.
In this case Apple may have an advantage because the software is "just" doing inferencing, I guess, which isn't likely to be advantageous to keep secret, and inferencing logic is fairly stable, small and inherently sandboxable. It should be easy to get it to be audited. For more general application of confidential/private computing though it's definitely an issue.
The issue of multiple Apple devs conspiring isn't so unlikely in my view. Bear in mind that end-to-end encryption made similar sorts of promises that tech firm employees can't read your messages, but the moment WhatsApp decided that combating "rumors" was the progressive thing to do they added a forwarding counter to messages so they could stop forwarding chains. Cryptography 101: your adversary should not be able to detect that you're repeating yourself; failed, just like that. The more plausible failure mode here is therefore not the case of spies or saboteurs but rather a deliberate weakening of the software boundary to leak data to Apple because executives decide they have a moral duty to do so. This doesn't even necessarily have to be kept secret. WhatsApp's E2E forwarding policy is documented on their website, they announced it in a blog post. My experience is that 99% of even tech workers believe that it does give you normal cryptographic guarantees and is un-censorable as a consequence, which just isn't the case.
Still, all this does lay the foundations for much stronger and more trustworthy systems, even if not every problem is addressed right away.
The level of conspiracy needed to keep something like this a secret would be unprecedented.
And if Apple was able to do that why wouldn't they just backdoor iOS/OSX instead of baking it into the hardware.
You do have to trust the SEP/TPM here, it sounds like. That is verified by having a third party auditor watch them get installed, and by the anonymous proxy routing thingy making it so they can't fake only some of them but would have to fake all of them to be reliable.
If they were okay with it being unreliable, then clients could tell via timing because some of the nodes would perform differently, or they'd perform differently depending on which client or what prompt it was processing. It's surprisingly difficult to hide timing differences, eg all those Spectre cache-reading attacks on browsers.
It does look like there's room to add more verification (like the client asking the server to do more intensive proofs, or homomorphic encryption). Could always go ask for it.
If instead you assume your attackers have limited resources, things like this increase the costs attackers have to spend to compromise targets, reducing the number of viable targets and/or the depth to which they can penetrate them.
One of these threat models is actually useful.
There is absolutely no technical solution where Apple can prove our data isn't exfiltrated as long as this is their software that runs on their hardware.
I can advertise a service running on open hardware with open software. Unless you personally come inspect my datacenters to verify my claims, you’ll never be happy. Even then you need to confirm that I’m not just sending your traffic here only when you’re looking, and sending it to my evil backdoored hardware when you aren’t.
At some point you have to trust that an operator is acting in good faith. You need to trust that your own hardware wasnt backdoored by the manufacturer. You need to trust that the software you’re running is faithfully compiled from the source code you haven’t personally inspected.
If you don’t trust Apple’s motives, that’s certainly your prerogative. But don’t act like this ridiculous set of objections would suddenly end if they only just used RISC-V and open source. I would bet my life’s savings that you happily use services from other providers you don’t hold to this same standard.
FUD.
Diffie Hellman, Homomorphic encryption, zero knowledge proofs, decentralized triple (sender, messenger, receiver) layered protocol.
Faraday caged, deafened power supply, Heartbeat/pulse sensors, proximity sensors, voltage sensors, EM/radio triggers, dead-man switch, all reporting with constantly rotating codes.
Multiple servers in different locations, depending on threat model because of jurisdiction, with XOR'd secrets, with random access to memory to obfuscate the real address if it needs zeroed/oned/zeroed, Da Vinci codex style.
Make access directly tied to reputation/staked interest/invitation, with subtle canaries and watermarks.
Even if it got super-chilled and no noticeable voltage disruption, and someone didn't set off any other alarm bells, they still have to get the other machine within the timeout.
And you could just do 3/5 multi-sig, and apply CAP theorem.
But if the best people in the world can't do it ("for more than a year"), then there is something less than ideal in the above hypothetical.
Throwing random cryptography buzzwords at a problem does not magically create a secure solution.
Even if you had a genie to give you all of this, you’d absolutely want to include and build upon the work Apple is doing here.
>Throwing random cryptography buzzwords at a problem does not magically create a secure solution.
Diffie Hellman,
Homomorphic encryption, zero knowledge proofs,
decentralized triple (sender, messenger, receiver) layered protocol.
Faraday caged, deafened power supply, Heartbeat/pulse sensors, proximity sensors, voltage sensors, EM/radio triggers, dead-man switch, all reporting with constantly rotating codes.
>Even if you had a genie to give you all of this,
>you’d absolutely want to include and build upon the work Apple is doing here.
My concern here is with Apple Intelligence and this wishy-washy hybrid approach where some of the time your data is sent to the "private cloud" and some of the time it's processed locally on device. I absolutely hate that and need a big switch in Settings that completely turns off all cloud processing of data; but given how much they're spending on advertising how "private" their cloud is I suspect they plan to not make that optional at all (not just opt-out by default). At that point, all the photos you take might be sent to their cloud for "beautification" or whatever and there's no way to know whether they're also analyzed for other things or sent out to the CCP to make sure you're not participating in a protest against Xi.
American Lawyers of the highest pedigree (HNWI) don't even use email.
Your hardware is back-doored, as Intel is named "Intel" for a (nearly too poignant) reason.
they glow in the dark, you can see em in your driving.
run em over, thats what ya do
The court entered this ruling despite testimony from an attorney who stated, “[b]ecause of the [FISA Amendments Act], we now have to assume that every one of our international communications may be monitored by the government.” Id., 133 S.Ct. at 1148.
The gold standard for WAPS is the Gorgon Stare system which is deployed aboard the Reaper UAS. The current version of Gorgon Stare uses five electro-optical and four infrared cameras to generate imagery from 12 different angles. Gorgon Stare can provide a continuous city-sized overall picture, multiple sub-views of the overall field and what are high resolution “chipouts” of individual views, each of which can be streamed in real time to multiple viewers. A single Gorgon Stare pod can generate two terabytes of data a day.
"After scandals with the distribution of secret documents by WikiLeaks, the exposes by Edward Snowden, reports about Dmitry Medvedev being bugged during his visit to the G20 London summit (in 2009), it has been decided to expand the practice of creating paper documents," the source said.
Since 2008, most of Intel’s chipsets have contained a tiny homunculus computer called the “Management Engine” (ME). The ME is a largely undocumented master controller for your CPU: it works with system firmware during boot and has direct access to system memory, the screen, keyboard, and network. All of the code inside the ME is secret, signed, and tightly controlled by Intel. Last week, vulnerabilities in the Active Management (AMT) module in some Management Engines have caused lots of machines with Intel CPUs to be disastrously vulnerable to remote and local attackers.
And the secure routing does make most of these attacks infeasible.
For example, https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapple%2Fsecurity-pcc%20rd..., lists out all references to `rdar` which is a link schema for Apple's bug management system.
Also, it is clear that the code is cross platform (it references iOS and macOS). So the code here gives clues as to the security operation of iOS as well in case you wanted to do iOS security research.
It is lovely to see the middleware here written in Swift. It is quite chunky. Reading all that XPC code gives me the shivers (as I've personal experience with how tricky that can get).
Overall it is a very interesting offering. I wish I had two weeks to burn through the details... [I am the author of The Road to Zero, and iOS Crash Dump Analysis].
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.
Is it as secure as they say? Then it doesn't matter if all the money Apple has is the reward, because nobody can get it. A max bounty of $50 000 for "Accidental or unexpected data disclosure due to deployment or configuration issue" is silly low.
I hope you'll consider adding witness cosignatures on your transparency log though. :)
there is no private other-people-computer, by definition.
what those attempts try to do, is to change the definition.
That to me is the innovation here, everything else is just standard bits.
I haven't had time to dig through the splunklogger, but I had hoped that logging was mostly disabled and you could only emit metrics. That was my reading of the PCC manifesto.
https://research.samsung.com/blog/The-Next-New-Normal-in-Com...
"From a computational perspective, a trusted end-to-end data path will be established, ensuring the security of the entire process. This encompasses data collection on user devices and data processing on servers as well as the processing of privacy-sensitive data directly on user devices."
I have been trying to look for that but I guess it will likely be a bit longer.
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).
You are right. Apple is fully in control of the servers and the software, and there is no way for a customer to verify Apple's claims. Nevertheless system transparency is a useful concept. It can effectively reduce the number of things you have to blindly trust to a short and explicit list. Conversely it forces the operator, in this case Apple, to explicitly lie. As others have pointed out, that is quite a business risk.
As for transparency logs, it is an amazing technology which I can highly recommend you take a look at in case you don't know what it is or how it works. Check out transparency.dev or the project I'm involved in, sigsum.org.
> they are almost guaranteed to be misusing that data
That is very unlikely because of the liability, as others have pointed out. They are making claims which the Apple PCC architecture helps make falsifiable.
Transparency logs are capable of verifying that, it's more or less the whole point of them. (Strictly speaking, you can make it arbitrarily expensive to fake it.)
Also, if they were "transferring your data elsewhere" it would be a GDPR violation. Ironically wrt your China claim, it would also be illegal in China, which does in fact have privacy laws.
If you don't trust the boot process/code signing system then you'd want to do something else, like ask the server to show you parts of its memory on demand in case you catch it lying to you. (Not sure if that's doable here because the server has other people's data on it, which is the whole point.)
(You need to prove that the system is showing you the server your data is present on, and not just showing you an innocuous one and actually processing your data on a different evil one.)
Even if they were running open source software with cryptographically verified / reproducible builds, it's still running on their hardware (any component or the OS / kernel or even hardware can be hooked into to exfiltrate unencrypted data).
Companies like Apple don't give a crap about GDPR violations (you can look at their "DMA compliance" BS games to see to what extent they're willing to go to skirt regulations in the name of profit).
The log is publicly accessible and append-only, so such an event would not go un-noticed. Not sure what a non-transparent log is.
Maybe I'm not being clear; transparent logs solve the problem of supply chain attacks (that is, Apple can use the logs to some degree to ensure some 3rd party isn't modifying their code), but I'm trying to say Apple themselves ARE the bad actor, they will exfiltrate customer data for their own profit (to personalize ads, or continue building user profiles, or sell to governments and so on).
I think we have different understandings of what the transparency log is utilized for.
The log is used effectively as an append-only hash set of trusted software hashes a PCC node is allowed to run, accomplished using Merkle Trees. The client device (iPhone) uses the log to determine if the software measurements from an attestation should be rejected or not.
https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
Bottom line, I just hope that there will be a big checkbox in the iPhone's settings that completely turns off all "cloud compute" for AI scenarios (checked by default) and I hope it gets respected everywhere. But they're making such a big deal of how "private" this data exfiltration service is that I fear they plan to just make it default on (or not even provide an opt-out at all).
It is so much more than that, but you are entitled to your own opinion.
davidczech has already explained it quite well, but I'll try explaining it a different way.
Consider the verification of a signed software update. The verifier, e.g. apt-get, rpm, macOS Update, Microsoft Update or whatever OS you're running. They all have some trust policy that contains a public key. The verifier only trusts software signed by the public key.
Now imagine a verifier with a trust policy that mandates that all signed software must also be discoverable in a transparency log. Such a trust policy would need to include:
- a pubkey trusted to make the claim "I am your trusted software publisher and this software is authentic", i.e. it is from Debian / Apple / Microsoft or whomever is the software publisher.
- a pubkey trusted to make the claim "I am your trusted transparency log and this software, or rather the publisher's signature, has been included in my log and is therefore discoverable"
The verifier would therefore require the following in order to trust a software update:
- the software (and its hash) - a signature over the software's hash, done by the software publisher's key - an inclusion proof from the transparency log
There is another layer that could be added called witness cosigning, which reduces the amount of trust you need to place in the transparency log. For more on that see my other comments in this thread.
My concern is that Apple themselves will include code in their officially signed builds that extracts customer data. All of these security measures cannot protect against that because Apple is a "trusted software publisher" in the chain.
All of this is great stuff, Apple makes sure someone else doesn't get the customer data and they remain the only ones to monetize it.
That's the whole point of the transparency log. Anything published, and thus to be trusted by client devices, is publicly inspectable.
One of the projects I'm working on however intends to enable just that. See system-transparency.org for more. There's also glasklarteknik.se.
The source code provided is for reference to help with disassembly.
Edit link: https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
There's a key signing ceremony with a third-party auditor watching; it seems to rely on trusting them together with the secure boot process. But there are other things you can add to this, basically along the lines of making the machine continually prove that it behaves like the system described in the log.
They don't control all of the service though; part of the system is that the server can't identify the user because everything goes through third party proxies owned by several different companies.
> Companies like Apple don't give a crap about GDPR violations
GDPR fines are 4% of the company's yearly global revenue. If you're a cold logical profit maximizer, you're going to care about that a lot!
Beyond that, they've published a document saying all this stuff, which means you can sue them for securities fraud if it turns out to be a lie. It's illegal for US companies to lie to their shareholders.
Apple has lied to shareholders before, remember those "what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone" billboards back in the day they used to fool everyone into thinking Apple cares about privacy? A couple years later, they were proudly announcing how everyone's iPhone will scan their files and literally send them to law enforcement if they match some opaque government-controlled database of hashes (yes, they backed out of that plan eventually, but not before massive public outcry and going through a few "you're holding it wrong" explanations).
So sue them.
> how everyone's iPhone will scan their files and literally send them to law enforcement
That was a solution for if you opted into a cloud service, was a strict privacy improvement because it came alongside end-to-end encryption in the cloud, and I think was mandated by upcoming EU regulations (although I think they changed the regulations so it was dropped.)
Note in the US service providers are required to report CSAM to NCMEC if they see it; it's literally the only thing they're required to do. But NCMEC is not "law enforcement" or "government", it's a private organization specially named in the law. Very important distinction because if anyone does give your private information to law enforcement you'd lose your 4th Amendment rights over it, since the government can share it with itself.
(I think it may actually be illegal to proactively send PII to law enforcement without them getting a subpoena first, but don't remember. There's an exception for emergency situations, and those self service portals that large corporations have are definitely questionable here.)