I assume (and this is my opinion, to be ultra-clear) that it's a blocker for E2E encryption. As we've seen before, they wanted to do it by backed off after government pressure. It wouldn't surprise me if this removes a blocker.
Apple has shown that they prefer pushing things to be done on-device, and in general I think they've shown it to be a better approach.
From what I remember iCloud is only encrypted at rest but not E2E. Apple can decrypt it anytime.
The password manager (Keychain) is the only fully encrypted part of iCloud; If you lose your devices or forget the main password, the manager will empty itself. This does not happen with any other part of iCloud.
That really makes little to no sense - it's not E2EE if you're going to be monitoring files that enter the encrypted storage. That's snakeoil encryption at that point.
I sincerely doubt Apple is planning to do E2EE with iCloud storage considering that really breaks a lot of account recovery situations & is generally a bad UX for non-technical users.
They're also already scanning for information on the cloud anyway.
Eh, I disagree - your definition feels like moving the goalposts.
Apple is under no obligation to host offending content. Check it before it goes in (akin to a security checkpoint in real life, I guess) and then let me move on with my life, knowing it couldn't be arbitrarily vended out to x party.
Any image that would trigger _for this hashing aspect_ would already trigger _if you uploaded it to iCloud where they currently scan it already_. Literally nothing changes for my life, and it opens up a pathway to encrypting iCloud contents.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a method for decrypting _if it's matching an already known or flagged item_. It's not enabling decrypting arbitrary payloads.
From your link:
>In particular, the server learns the associated payload data for matching images, but learns nothing for non-matching images.
Past this point I'll defer to actual cryptographers (who I'm sure will dissect and write about it), but to me this feels like a decently smart way to go about this.
Apple has shown that they prefer pushing things to be done on-device, and in general I think they've shown it to be a better approach.