Security News > 2021 > June > Apple Will Offer Onion Routing for iCloud/Safari Users

Apple Will Offer Onion Routing for iCloud/Safari Users
2021-06-22 11:54

At this year's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple announced something called "iCloud Private Relay." That's basically its private version of onion routing, which is what Tor does.

Privacy Relay is built into both the forthcoming iOS and MacOS versions, but it will only work if you're an iCloud Plus subscriber and you have it enabled from within your iCloud settings.

Once it's enabled and you open Safari to browse, Private Relay splits up two pieces of information that - when delivered to websites together as normal - could quickly identify you.

Once the two pieces of information are split, Private Relay encrypts your DNS request and sends both the IP address and now-encrypted DNS request to an Apple proxy server.

At this point, Apple has already handed over the encryption keys to the third party running the second of the two stops, so Apple can't see what website you're trying to access with your encrypted DNS request.

Although it has received both your IP address and encrypted DNS request, Apple's server doesn't send your original IP address to the second stop.


News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/06/apple-will-offer-onion-routing-for-icloud-safari-users.html

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