The point is that there are layers of security, and by moving the data outside of their physical control apple has given up one of those layers of security.
It might matter, yes. A company run by a guy like Eric Schmidt is a lot more likely to play nice with the US government when it comes to privacy compared to a company run by a guy like Cook, who from the outside seems obsessed with user-privacy (as long as China isn't directly involved).
Google is a huge company, the idea that it would set out to do something that everyone involved in would know is directly breaking the law (rather than doing something thats a grey area, or they know is legal but 'unethical' or could become a PR issue, or destroy trust in them and destroy their product) is fairly unbelievable.
This comes up again and again with stories about Google and (particularly) AWS cloud computing. I hope for better on HN!
There’s also mainstream reporting that Amazon employees used retail sales data to launch competing products: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...
Maybe the first story is fake and the second is real… but they both point to a “win at all costs” company culture where policies might be violated, even if it threatens trust in the platform and a PR problem when exposed.
Hacking computers, networks, or services of your competitors, even when running in you data center is just bad business.
You're reading that a lot differently than I am.
The quoted post says:
>AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products
None of that reads, to me, as them having had to use confidential data to do any of these things.
You can identify many organisations that are running on AWS without knowing anything about AWS accounts - blog posts, IP space, public code, social media comments from staff, linkedin and all sorts of other places will often reveal that.
Scraping/finding customer lists can be done using research, too. I've spoken to Account Manager-types at places and they've often used various tools that scrape other public resources to identify customers of competing services.
Swap out company names, and it's effectively what I've seen from a bunch of companies, without it delving into anything unethical.
Data is still data.
> Google is a huge company, the idea that it would set out to do something that everyone involved in would know is directly breaking the law (rather than doing something thats a grey area, or they know is legal but 'unethical' or could become a PR issue, or destroy trust in them and destroy their product) is fairly unbelievable.
They do this in Europe by not complying with GDPR. ( and they are not the only one)
> This comes up again and again with stories about Google and (particularly) AWS cloud computing. I hope for better on HN!
Google employs the same standard issue tech person you see here on HN.
And for the "encrypted data at rest" scenario we're talking about here, where symmetric encryption suffices, quantum crypto makes no sense what-so-ever.
This is extremely unlikely.
> What we know is that, extrapolating compute speed from the past decades and even assuming quantum computers become useable in practice, the best algorithms we currently have cannot be brute-forced within the next 50 years.
Quantum computers only offer a quadratic speedup against symmetric ciphers.
AES 256 will survive much longer than the next 50 years against brute force attacks.
It will either be broken spectacularly, using theoretical methods entirely inconceivable today, or live on – brute force is of no concern at all due to the amounts of energy and matter required to perform it against 256 bit keys.
From what I understand it simply can't be broken by brute force because simply iterating through every possible value of a 256 bit key would require more energy than there is in the universe, and that's without actually trying any of the combinations, just simply having a computer do a i++ through all possible values.
I'm not sure if quantum computing helps here in any way , someone else would need to chime in here with details.
Theoretically a quantum computer can brute-force AES-256 using 2^128 sequential steps using Grover's algorithm (i.e. a quadratic advantage over a classical computer). Parallelization diminishes the advantage, e.g. if you're limited to 2^64 sequential steps, you get a 2^64 speedup over classical, for a cost of 2^192 which is still ridiculously large.
Thus quantum computing is not a relevant threat for AES-256 or most other 256-bit symmetric crypto.
It's my understanding that when encryption gets "broken", it usually refers to something other than a simple brute force attack. Like, something that would make it so you don't need to run as many iterations or whatever.
I assume this because a brute force attack is something that is always possible from day 1, whereas an encryption scheme being broken is something that happens some time afterwards.
As a counter-example, DES would count as "unbroken" under your definition. The EFF built a machine in 1998 for under $250,000 that could crack a DES key in under 24 hours. I don't know what that would cost today, but I wouldn't be surprised if a couple GPUs could get you the same thing today.
The difference is whether such an attack has even a vanishing chance of succeeding. For AES, the hardware just isn't anywhere close to that. Afaik, there isn't anything that could even hypothetically threaten to make brute force attacks on AES feasible on the table today.
DES is both weak and broken, but it could be either without the other.
AES-256 was broken in 2011.[1] While only four times faster than brute force and thus not a practical attack, it suggests that compromise is possible. The Snowden documents indicated that the NSA was working on breaking AES-256. It seems unlikely they would waste effort on a task they considered impossible. Whatever they achieve will be achievable by others eventually.
On top of that, no implementation is perfect. Bugs are discovered in cryptographic APIs on a regular basis. Even if your API is perfect, the application calling the API can have bugs that allow compromise.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120905154705/http://research.m...
Inch by inch "don't be evil" has been replaced with "maximize profit".
I have no doubt that if in 20 years decrypting "historical" Apple user data for "training purposes" is legal and will make Google leadership more money, they will pressure ethically flexible engineers to do it for them.
Assume anything profitable that is legally defensible somewhere in the world will be done by every surveillance capitalism company at some point.
Like, suddenly everything becomes plaintext.
Yes. If you want your data protected, it always matters where you store it.
Well, while there is truth to that, it isn't the whole story. There is a time value to all information that must be factored in. If nothing else, think of one overbroad* classification example: Battle plans, SECRET; Intelligence; TOP SECRET.
* By which I mean there are subtleties and exceptions too numerous to go into here, but the example remains largely illustrative.
The higher the classification, the higher the long term time value, the greater robustness required in one's controls.
In this case, information about/for large numbers of private individuals, today's strong enough symmetric encryption may be strong enough for quite some time.
Or it might not be. I'd love to see a detailed risk assessment....
Where are the keys though? If they ever end up on the same platform it doesn't matter.