Title
Towards a tectonic traffic shift?: investigating Apple's new relay network.
Abstract
Apple recently published its first Beta of the iCloud Private Relay, a privacy protection service with promises resembling the ones of VPNs. The architecture consists of two layers (ingress and egress), operated by disjoint providers. The service is directly integrated into Apple's operating systems and therefore provides a low entry level barrier for a large user base. It seems to be set up for major adoption with its relatively moderate entry-level price. This paper analyzes the iCloud Private Relay from a network perspective and its effect on the Internet and future measurement-based research. We perform EDNS0 Client Subnet DNS queries to collect ingress relay addresses and find 1586 IPv4 addresses. Supplementary RIPE Atlas DNS measurements reveal 1575 IPv6 addresses. Knowledge about these addresses helps to passively detect clients communicating through the relay network. According to our scans, from January through April, ingress addresses grew by 20%. The analysis of our scans through the relay network verifies Apple's claim of rotating egress addresses. Nevertheless, it reveals that ingress and egress relays can be located in the same autonomous system, thus sharing similar routes, potentially allowing traffic correlation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3517745.3561426
ACM/SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Patrick Sattler100.68
Juliane Aulbach200.34
Johannes Zirngibl331.06
Georg Carle4951133.84