iCloud for Windows downloading other people's photos

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/icloud-for-windows-corrupting-videos-downloading-other-peoples-photos.2370666/

by whatever1 • 4 years ago

377 79 4 years ago

forums.macrumors.com

Has somebody tried emailing this to Tim? a note saying it was ignored by apple's security submission process would probably be a good addition

s1mon• 4 years ago

I had another issue with iCloud and photo syncing being abysmally slow, and I ended up digging through LinkedIn and I found the director of engineering for photos at Apple. I messaged that person through LinkedIn, and ended up getting some very senior tech support people who helped go through my issues with me. I hesitate to post contact info, but just saying... it's possible if you are polite and can clearly articulate the issue to get someone like that to help really escalate the support.

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

You shouldn't have to "know a guy".

If I upload photos on, say, icloud.com, it'll turn up on my devices days later.

In 2022, that shouldn't be categorised as merely slow when it is basically broken.

This is a well-known issue with thousands and thousands of posts on various forums, with the usual answers of "Have you tried turning it off and on again?".

The photo sync functionality is probably the most broken part of the Apple ecosystem that I've encountered, and this security issue just proves my suspicions.

whatever12• 4 years ago

In a world of containers and micro services, I do not understand why we cannot have independent databases and buckets per user, specially if we are talking about sensitive data.

tyingq• 4 years ago

I'm guessing it's an uninitialized buffer in a shared encoder instance, where independent storage wouldn't have helped much.

_cenw• 4 years ago

It looks like iCloud for Windows might remote-transcode HEVC down into a format that doesn't ask for a fee to be played back on that platform. In that case it's probably a good idea to stop using iCloud for Windows right now.

jjtheblunt• 4 years ago

well clearly we can, and this is clearly a monstrous bug ?

nhinck2• 4 years ago

Where do you keep the record of which container belongs to which user and how does that record avoid the same problem?

whatever12• 4 years ago

The encoder container / lambda would had been spawned for that particular user and it would have permissions to access only the content of that specific user.

ilikehurdles• 4 years ago

This should be a showstopper, critical issue. I’m surprised to see this still be in the wild after being posted on Friday of last week.

walrus01• 4 years ago

Imagine getting still frames of somebody else's bedroom photos or kinky selfies sent to a partner or something similar rendered into your own video.

This could be very much like the technical cloud-based version of the fictional Tyler Durden splicing dick pics into single frames of 35mm film movies.

Based on what people use phones for these days some sizable percentage of icloud synced photos have to be something you really wouldn't want to get out there to random other icloud users.

Kenji• 4 years ago

Imagine having CSAM inserted in your videos, then getting persecuted for it. Oh wait, they already scan for it, good on them.

greasyfullfryup• 4 years ago

I'm not surprised at all. I've reported literal malware in the App Store, with disassembly of the binary, etc. to them and Apple's "security" team did nothing. The inaction wasn't the worst part, it was their complete disinterest and lack of communication.

Google is even worse, you can't contact a human. Their app reporting process insisted I create a Google account and report it from within Android's App Store if I expected them to take action. I have better things to do than jump through unnecessary hoops.

userbinator• 4 years ago

IMHO leaking PII is on an entirely different level than "just" malware.

lovehashbrowns• 4 years ago

Holy heck this is a bad one. That response from the security team is completely unacceptable. I wonder if there's a way to force this to happen, e.g. by modifying the file contents directly.

Kibae• 4 years ago

Why aren't photos and files encrypted in the cloud? I feel like it should be standard for cases like this.

Bilal_io• 4 years ago

It's Apple. As long as its users have the perception of security and privacy, they may not change anything.

MBCook2• 4 years ago

Maybe they are, but the gold returned from the sever isn’t.

When they tried to encrypt photos end-to-end much of HN (and others) flipped out and raised such a fuss they gave up.

commoner• 4 years ago

When they tried to encrypt photos end-to-end

There is no evidence that iCloud was going to implement end-to-end encryption. This was a rumor that was spread by people who defended Apple's plan to implement on-device CSAM scanning.

smoldesu3• 4 years ago

much of HN (and others) flipped out

That must signal some widely-objectionable, obvious implementation error that rubbed common people and engineers the wrong way.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

Probably because people lose keys, forget password, and lose their treasured family photos.

That said, the option should at least be available to those who know the benefits and accept the risks.

floydnoel• 4 years ago

I think this is one of the biggest unsolved problems with holding private keys. There needs to be some kind of recoverable key system (secret sharing) that is bulletproof and idiot proof. Hopefully something like that is possible!

fulafel• 4 years ago

We have diluted the popular usage terminology so it's meaningless. Everyone ascribes the property "encrypted" to their service but you can't tell from that if they are just storing the key and the data next to each other in the database, or doing the equivalent with extra steps.

The important and hard part in crypto is key management, but that's considered too complicated a concept to explain to users.

ksidudwbw• 4 years ago

From Reolink (all they do here is use a TLS connection):

"Your Privacy Is Our Top Priority Security at the expense of privacy is not what we're committed to. Reolink Cloud collaborates with Amazon Web Services for secure data storage. Also, we use standard AES algorithm for data transmission encryption, use RSA/ECDHE algorithm for secure key exchange, and follow the TLS standards. When you save footage to Cloud or play clips back, your personal information is always kept confidential from beginning to end."

benhurmarcel• 4 years ago

They can't even consider encrypting them, since they are forced to scan for CSAM and the public overwhelmingly rejected on-device scanning. So their server needs access to the images.

est312• 4 years ago

In theory this is meant to be one of the advantages of end to end encryption: no more "accidental" leakage of user data between users, leakage in logs, etc (remember Facebook's logging incident? [0]). as it's only available on end user devices. And if you look at Apple's documentation [1], they say that iCloud is end to end encrypted. This is obviously not accurate as Apple keeps decryption keys for themselves. But this issue is even worse: here, the end to end encryption was circumvented in such a bad way that this bug could surface.

[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds...

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

sneak4• 4 years ago

Apple does not claim that iCloud photos are end to end encrypted.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

est312• 4 years ago

Good point about that. Makes sense then how this issue could surface.

johnnyAghands• 4 years ago

Makes sense, good set of training data :)

MichaelCollins• 4 years ago

Right, they say iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but this is only true if you and the people you talk to don't use iCloud backups. If you do, then iMessage's E2E encryption silently degrades to key escrow.

conradev3• 4 years ago

One thing to remember is that end-to-end encryption comes with the very real possibility of complete and total loss of data, which is hard to stomach for someone’s entire photo library.

iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but a key to decrypt messages is stored in iCloud backups.

sneak4• 4 years ago

Reminder: Photos and videos in iCloud are not end to end encrypted (just like your device backup that contains your iMessage "e2e" keys) and are always readable by Apple (and thus FBI et al).

Apple is required to hand over data without a search warrant over 30,000 times per year to US authorities.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

kls0e2• 4 years ago

Is there a way to have new iMessage e2e keys generated after disabling iCloud device backup?

wtallis• 4 years ago

According to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 :

When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple.

So it doesn't look like any extra steps are required.

astrange• 4 years ago

There’s nothing special about a “search warrant” compared to other equally valid forms of legal process.

quyleanh• 4 years ago

Then Google Photos. Now iCloud Photos. When Onedrive Photos?

I'm currently using Onedrive (with Office 365) as my main data backup...

plantain• 4 years ago

Plot twist - iCloud uses Google Cloud for storage.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/29/icloud-data-stored-on-g...

goosedragons• 4 years ago

Anyone else think the "scanlines" in the video are not scanlines but actually data of some sort? They seem to have white/black bits. Suggesting it might be some sort of data the video codec displays that way.

6510• 4 years ago

One could argue that the response makes icloud illegal in the EU.

mhitza• 4 years ago

All US operated websites are technically illegal in EU (due to the CLOUD Act). Practically, they are still used en masse. In theory the next iteration of the Privacy Shield (or whatever name they are going to give it this time around) and which EU-US should sign sometime next year should reconcile in some way the existing privacy issues where EU residents personal data does not have adequate privacy protection once it's touched by a US company.

extr0pian• 4 years ago

This happened to me during a Google Takeout export when I was degoogling in late 2019. I recall going through some photos from the earlier 2010's and some random pictures of other people were popping up. About a month or so later I received an email from Google letting me know that some of my files may have been accidentally in other people's exports. Since then, I stopped using apps like Google Photos and cloud storage in general. If I do, my files will be encrypted before I upload them.

Here's the original story: https://9to5google.com/2020/02/03/google-photos-video-strang...

StanislavPetrov• 4 years ago

Another reminder that "the cloud" is really just someone else's computer.

Jerrrry• 4 years ago

If this can happen accidentally, it can happen on purpose.

A glitch is just an exploit that just hasn't been sufficiently documented.

tibbydudeza2• 4 years ago

I get the feeling that the folks working on the Windows/Android team at Apple are not highly regarded - get the sense of "folks working in the basement" - you can see it by the lackluster stuff they ship.

layer8• 4 years ago

As a Windows/Android developer, you probably don't apply at Apple for a job, and as an Apple employee you're probably not too enamored with developing for Windows/Android.

tibbydudeza2• 4 years ago

Apple Music was Beats Music and iTunes just added cruft over the years and the Windows version was eventually added to the Windows Store with no improvement whatsever (podcasts was the last big upgrade).

Guess iTunes has been sunset and deprecated by Apple Music - who buys music tracks these days ???.

I must be the only oddball that still curates and listens to his music on a PC (Spotify).

divbzero• 4 years ago

This kind of bug is unacceptable for a supposedly private cloud service. I wonder how long the bug has been around and whether it is at all related to the recent roll out of iCloud Shared Photo Library.

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud-windows/use-icloud-sh...

languageserver2• 4 years ago

There is absolutely no proof that these are images from other peoples iCloud accounts.

Assuming these are even from iCloud in the first place, they could have been their version of "stock photos".

Assuming these are from iCloud, could have been the user's previous deleted photos. Could also just be photos on their windows computer. So many options. Going straight for the most unlikely scenario is strange, and seems like people have an agenda.

Aaron2222• 4 years ago

Stock photos had crossed my mind as a possibility as well, but I'd say it's unlikely to be previously deleted photos or from their Windows computer if they're seeing photos of kids they don't know.

languageserver2• 4 years ago

yea, maybe the computer is used?

All I am saying is that this is a very serious security breach if true, and everyone in this thread is taking a forum post at face value. There are a hundred things that could "cause" this, even if true.

iCloud for Windows downloading other people's photos

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