[Cryptography] Apple's iCloud+ "VPN"

[Jerry Leichter]

> 
>> of course this is in a situation where there are at most tens of thousands of beta users.  What will happen when there are hundreds of millions
> 
> You are radically overestimating the number of users.  This service applies only to paid iCloud subscribers who opt in.
It's hard to find solid numbers on this - Apple keeps details close to the chest.  An analysis back at the beginning of 2018 claimed there were 170 million paying customers.  That's before Apple's big push into services.  It's not the same thing at all, but an estimate about 7 months back reported 585 million paid subscribers across all Apple services.  Since Apple now offers a "package deal" of multiple services, including iCloud storage, the numbers are certainly up, but only Apple knows by how much.

So billions is an overestimate but hundreds of millions is probably not.

> 
>> Given the large number of very well-connected POP's both parties have, it's quite possible that the effective diameter might end up lower.
> 
> No, that is not possible.  Tromboning a path through two additional points cannot make the path shorter.

I'm not sure why you say that.  It's certainly true when the path between servers is public - as would be the case for Tor.  But both Apple and the big CDN's have plenty of private connections between their own endpoints.  A single hop over one of these connections could easily bypass multiple public point-to-point links.
                                                        -- Jerry