On September 20, 2021, Apple released iCloud Private Relay (archive) as a new service on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey. Although Apple does not introduce Private Relay as a censorship circumvention tool, in this post, we attempt to understand the potential value of iCloud Private Relay for censorship circumvention. We first introduce how private relay works based on Apple’s documents and our measurement. We then present our empirical observation on its censorship resilience, support...
