The dedupe would be ineffective here unless there's key re-use since Apple AES-128s every chunk before it goes to 3rd party storage.

It appears they derive the chunk encryption key from the chunk content, so dedupe will be possible if they don't randomize the IV or nonce ([0], page 53). The guide also mention convergent encryption, which would confirm this. Personally, I find it sketchy privacy wise.

[0] https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

These types of busy-work machinations are often done by cloud providers around encryption. The purpose is apparently to say they use ciphers but also keep the keys in order for decrypting data.

Cloudkit and iCloudDrive use Account Keys, but it isn't clear if those are key encryption keys or data encryption keys. It also isn't clear if those are protected from information only from the client, or if the cloud is able to freely read them. The differences are massive in regards to privacy, and this document really doesn't have the needed technical information to make an informed decision.

Does GCP GCS really autodedup? I haven't seen anything in their documentation that suggests they do, and generally deduplication is known to have unavoidable performance characteristics, especially if you're in a very distributed environment.

I am not sure what you mean with pennies, they charge the same as AWS, and Dropbox just showed that doing everything inhouse saves them millions of $$.

When you are one of the largest companies in the world, millions really isn't all that much (for your infrastructure).

What is the measure you are using for Dropbox being one of the largest companies in the world?

In the beginning of 2017 Dropbox claimed a $1 Billion dollar run rate, however at the end of 2017 Dropbox had a net loss of $110 Million. When your entire year is a loss of $110 Million, saving $75 Million is very important to the companies survival.

I was talking about Apple.

Ah. That makes much more sense.

Thanks!