Apple Launches Private Cloud Compute for Privacy-Centric AI Processing
11-June-24
Apple has announced the launch of a “groundbreaking cloud intelligence system” called Private Cloud Compute (PCC) that’s designed for processing artificial intelligence (AI) tasks in a privacy-preserving manner in the cloud. PCC coincides with the arrival of new generative AI (GenAI) features – collectively dubbed Apple Intelligence, or AI for short. The architecture that underpins PCC is a custom-built server node that brings together Apple silicon, Secure Enclave, and Secure Boot against the backdrop of a hardened operating system that’s tailor made for running Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads. Technologies such as Pointer Authentication Codes and sandboxing act to resist such exploitation and limit an attacker’s horizontal movement within the PCC node. This combination of memory safety and the principle of least privilege removes entire classes of attacks on the inference stack itself and limits the level of control and capability that a successful attack can obtain.
