During the WWDC 2024 eventApple presented its latest innovations in terms of artificial intelligence, renamed for the occasion “Apple Intelligence”.
A particular focus was placed on user privacy with the introduction of the system Private Cloud Computing (PCC). This cloud AI system extends Apple’s security and privacy standards to the processing of cloud-based AI data, ensuring that users’ personal data is completely inaccessible to anyone, including Apple itself.
A company blog post describes the PCC as “built with custom Apple silicon a hardened operating system designed for privacy“, and is billed as “the most advanced security architecture ever deployed for large-scale cloud AI.”
Surprisingly, the system it is not based on the latest versions of macOS or iOSbut on a completely new operating systemspecifically designed for these operations.
Apple has not revealed many details about this operating system, including its name. However, the post states that it is “a hardened subset of the iOS and macOS foundationsadapted to support large language model inference workloads with an extremely small attack surface.”
Although not much is known about the new operating system that Apple has designed for PCC, soon everything will become clearer. In fact, the company said: “When we launch Private Cloud Compute, we will take the extraordinary step of making software images of every production build of PCC publicly available for security research.”
This includes every relevant application and executable, and the operating system itself. Apple adds, “The software will be published within 90 days from inclusion in the registry, or after relevant software updates become available, whichever is sooner.”
This initiative is part of Apple’s commitment to rStrengthen confidence in the security and privacy of its cloud systemsin an era where the protection of personal data is increasingly critical.
