Beyond Prompt Injection: Hacking Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (CVE-2026-20685)

A path traversal in darwin-init, the PID 1 process that provisions every Apple Private Cloud Compute node, gave a researcher an arbitrary root file write that survives the userspace reboot. One dropped plist redirected PCC's internal splunkloggingd forwarder to an attacker-controlled endpoint, leaking CloudBoard state, per-request inference metadata and token-level side channels. Apple's own…