Reader John McKnight is concerned about iCloud's security. He writes:My wife has an iPhone 4s and we recently purchased an iPad Air. Both are set up to use iCloud. I don't like having passwords and other kinds of personal information in the cloud and am thinking of attaching a password-protected storage device to my router so that I can create my own private "cloud." Just how secure is iCloud?It would be worth your while to read Apple's iCloud: iCloud security and privacy overview document. As its name hints, it spells out how your data is encrypted--both when it's transmitted between your computer and Apple's servers and when it's stored on those servers.The gist is that Apple uses a minimum of 128-bit AES encryption. This is the encryption standard used by banks and other financial institutions. As I write this, there is no practical way to crack AES-128 encryption--unless, of course, the NSA has found a way to introduce a weakness that allows it to get around it. But unless you're a
