[Cryptography] Apple's iCloud+ "VPN"

[Jerry Leichter]

>> An analysis back at the beginning of 2018 claimed there were 170 million paying customers… an estimate about 7 months back reported 585 million paid subscribers across all Apple services.
> 
> I appreciate your methodology, and that was my assumption, roughly, as well…  There are also 290 million users of Apple hardware, which I had taken to be a maximum bound.
Apple itself said earlier this year that there were more than 1 billion active iPhones, and 1.65 billion total Apple devices in active use.  That's world-wide.  Apple doesn't break things down by country, but estimates are between 113 and 118 million iPhones in the US.

>  But this is all speculation, so I guess I’ll just wait and see.
Agreed.

[Analyis using paths at the AS level, going up to paths of length 6.]
What matters is the number our routers you have to go through.  Here's a traceroute I just took:

traceroute to google.com (142.250.80.110), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  10.0.1.1 (10.0.1.1)  3.336 ms  2.514 ms  1.221 ms
 2  192.168.254.254 (192.168.254.254)  4.040 ms  3.369 ms  3.704 ms
 3  32.213.36.2 (32.213.36.2)  13.092 ms  12.752 ms  9.592 ms
 4  * 32.223.0.224 (32.223.0.224)  12.650 ms  11.186 ms
 5  32.222.231.21 (32.222.231.21)  14.453 ms  12.526 ms
    32.223.104.37 (32.223.104.37)  23.518 ms
 6  ae4---0.car01.wlfr.ct.frontiernet.net (74.40.71.93)  15.127 ms  12.513 ms  13.199 ms
 7  ae3---0.scr01.sccs.nj.frontiernet.net (74.40.3.233)  14.871 ms  15.067 ms  14.445 ms
 8  ae0---0.scr01.sccs.nj.frontiernet.net (74.40.3.234)  14.450 ms  15.224 ms  14.396 ms
 9  74.43.94.21 (74.43.94.21)  15.700 ms  15.391 ms  14.437 ms
10  108.170.248.97 (108.170.248.97)  14.746 ms
    108.170.248.33 (108.170.248.33)  15.364 ms
    108.170.248.97 (108.170.248.97)  17.730 ms
11  142.251.65.115 (142.251.65.115)  15.045 ms
    142.251.65.113 (142.251.65.113)  14.958 ms  20.643 ms
12  lga34s36-in-f14.1e100.net (142.250.80.110)  14.506 ms  13.952 ms  14.552 ms

OK, the first three hops are just to get out of the house, but still there's a lot going on after that.  There are six hops just internal to Frontier!

apple.com takes an additional hop:
traceroute to apple.com (17.253.144.10), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  10.0.1.1 (10.0.1.1)  2.714 ms  1.331 ms  1.340 ms
 2  192.168.254.254 (192.168.254.254)  3.254 ms  4.721 ms  3.198 ms
 3  32.213.36.2 (32.213.36.2)  13.344 ms  10.816 ms  11.832 ms
 4  32.223.0.224 (32.223.0.224)  12.977 ms  22.479 ms  11.816 ms
 5  32.222.231.21 (32.222.231.21)  10.479 ms  17.499 ms
    32.223.104.33 (32.223.104.33)  13.047 ms
 6  ae4---0.car01.wlfr.ct.frontiernet.net (74.40.71.93)  11.948 ms  11.360 ms  17.911 ms
 7  ae2---0.scr01.sccs.nj.frontiernet.net (74.40.3.249)  23.041 ms  19.068 ms  25.055 ms
 8  ae4---0.scr02.sccs.nj.frontiernet.net (74.40.3.85)  20.968 ms  20.406 ms  21.639 ms
 9  ae1---0.scr01.asbn.va.frontiernet.net (74.40.4.110)  20.175 ms  20.010 ms  21.005 ms
10  ae18---0.cor01.asbn.va.frontiernet.net (74.40.4.109)  21.798 ms  24.125 ms  21.715 ms
11  ae0---0.cbr01.asbn.va.frontiernet.net (74.40.2.174)  21.769 ms  21.780 ms  21.101 ms
12  17.1.144.13 (17.1.144.13)  51.346 ms  23.238 ms  20.809 ms
13  world-any.aaplimg.com (17.253.144.10)  22.296 ms !Z  21.538 ms !Z  20.989 ms !Z

There's plenty of room for bypasses here - though, granted, with all the hops inside of Frontier, the only thing that would help would be Apple ingress nodes inside of Frontier's network.
                                                        -- Jerry


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