So is there ever a time in the process when information stored on iCloud is unencrypted?

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Level 1

8 points

So is there ever a time in the process when information stored on iCloud is unencrypted?

For those items in this article it talks about being ecrypted during transmission and during storage but it doesn't say that the data is never unencrypted at any point in the process in between. I would only consider this safe if the personal files I store on iCloud (pics, docs, contacts, etc) are never unencrypted from the time they leave my device to the time they return to my devices.

LJ

iPad, iOS 5.1.1, iCloud Question

Posted on Aug 23, 2012 7:12 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 23, 2012 11:56 AM in response to LJinFLA

Welcome to the Apple Community.

Mail and notes are not encrypted on the servers, otherwise searching would not work properly.

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Answer 2

LJinFLA Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 23, 2012 1:32 PM in response to Winston Churchill

Thanks. Yes I read that in the article. What I am talking about are documents like PDFs, DOCs, XLS, pictures, list databases. The kinds of tings which would contain proprietary company information which would be expensive to expose to the anyone outside of the company. The doc says that they are encrypted in transfer, and encrypted in storgage. However the article doesn't explicitly state that they are NEVER in the process unencrypted. For example is the encryption in transfer(likely ssl or something similar) decrypted at their cloud host and then re-encrypted into 128-bit AES? That would mean that during that step in the process the documents would be in the clear (or leave artifacts on the drive) and then theoretically could be intercepted and exposed.

Does anyone know this for sure?

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Answer 3

Oct 1, 2012 2:07 PM in response to LJinFLA

I can't speak to how Apple handles encryption, but I have found that Wuala.com is one of the few cloud storage services that explicitly states that data is encrypted throughout the process (encrypted by the client on the device before data is transferred). I think this is what you are wondering about. I have to assume that since encryption at the device level is not mentioned with iCloud services, data is not processed in this way.

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