Apple’s Private Relay. A first step towards Mixing for the Masses

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-09 12:30:04

Yesterday Apple announced a new privacy protecting service: iCloud Private Relay. Very roughly speaking it appears to be a VPN seasoned with some poor man’s mix networking, hiding your IP address from the websites you visit, while Apple doesn’t learn which sites you are visiting. I think Private Relay is a very pragmatic approach that offers a significant privacy improvement to users of any online service, albeit only to those users that have an iCloud+ subscription. But taking this idea a small step further, pushing it down the stack and implementing at the Internet layer itself, the privacy of all Internet users would be protected.

I could not find any detailed technical specifications, but the following quote from Apple’s press release describes the essence nicely:

When browsing with Safari, Private Relay ensures all traffic leaving a user’s device is encrypted, so no one between the user and the website they are visiting can access and read it, not even Apple or the user’s network provider. All the user’s requests are then sent through two separate internet relays. The first assigns the user an anonymous IP address that maps to their region but not their actual location. The second decrypts the web address they want to visit and forwards them to their destination. This separation of information protects the user’s privacy because no single entity can identify both who a user is and which sites they visit.