Hacking the Cloud

So you might have heard that a number of celebrities had their personal (meaning: naked) photos stolen recently, through their accounts with Apple's iCloud system. Various low-information talking heads have made a lot of noise about this for close to a week now, blaming "the cloud" and mostly neither increasing their own or anyone else's level of information.

David Linthicum, of InfoWorld's "Cloud Computing" column, thinks the cloud is getting a bad rap throughout all this furor -- and it is, certainly -- but he also engages in the disingenuous "all systems can be hacked" argument to handwave it all away.

Yes, there have been other data breaches that are more serious than this one. And, yes, this was at most a failure of user security rather than a direct failure by the cloud provider -- Apple could have provided two-factor authentication, but most people hate that, and don't tolerate it for anything less serious than financial matters. (Though there may now be a market opening for a nude-selfie cloud provider with upgraded security -- especially if they throw in the ability to add and delete authorized viewers for specific pictures on the fly and have a Snapchat-esque purging system that actually works.)

But this breach was enabled entirely by the nature of the iCloud system. Whoever this hacker (or hackers) was, he used a publicly accessible distributed system (aka a "cloud") and was able to guess IDs and passwords for a number of famous people whose lives are well-documented. If those celebrities' photos were not automatically uploaded to a cloud storage system -- if they only lived on those individuals' phones and any computers they used to synch with those phones -- such a theft would not be possible. Absent iCloud, the only way to get these photos is to obtain the phones (or personal computers) themselves, and that's not scalable the way "hacking" the passwords of Jennifer Lawrence and her ilk is.

Placing data on a platform that can be accessed from any appropriate device that successfully accomplishes a security handshake makes that data inherently less protected. This is the case for pure cloud systems, as well as the credit-card databases that major retailers keep having trouble with. (I'm not a systems guy, so there's probably a good reason why those retailers don't use locked channels of communication that function purely between their known store locations and their data warehouse. At least, I hope there's a good reason, and it's not a case of "using the Internet was cheaper.")

If your data needs to be locked down because leakage to unauthorized users would be very damaging, perhaps it shouldn't have an IP address at all. That's all I'm saying.