Cloud backups are an invaluable source of information whether you download them from the user’s iCloud account or obtain directly from Apple. But why some iCloud backups miss essential bits and pieces of information such as text messages, particularly iMessages? The answer is “end-to-end encryption”, and there’s more to it than just backups.

How secure are your chats in your favorite instant messenger? Can someone intercept and read your secret conversations, and can you do something about it? Apple users have access to the highly popular instant messaging system, the iMessage. But how secure it really is? Let’s find out.

Apple iMessage is an important communication channel and an essential part of forensic acquisition efforts. iMessage chats are reasonably secure. Your ability to extract iMessages as well as the available sources of extraction will depend on several factors. Let’s discuss the factors that may affect your ability to extract, and what you can do to overcome them.

Instant messaging apps have become the de-facto standard of real-time, text-based communications. The acquisition of instant messaging chats and communication histories can be extremely important for an investigation. In this article, we compare the five top instant messaging apps for iOS in the context of their forensic analysis.

In today’s usage scenarios, messaging are not entirely about the text. Users exchange pictures and short videos, voice recordings and their current locations. These types of data are an important part of conversation histories; they can be just as valuable evidence as the text content of the chat.

iMessage is undoubtedly one of the most popular instant messaging platforms for an obvious reason: it’s built in to iOS and ships with every iPhone by default. iMessage does not require complex setup, so the number of iMessage users is closely matching the number of iPhone users. Apple sells about 200 million iPhones every year, and the total number of iPhones sold is more than a billion. Unless you absolutely must chat with someone outside of Apple’s ecosystem (like those poor Android folks), you won’t need Skype, WhatsApp or Telegram. It’s also comforting to know that iMessage works everywhere around the world while most other messengers are oppressed in one or more countries.

iOS 11.4 has finally brought a feature Apple promised almost a year ago: the iMessage sync via iCloud. This feature made its appearance in iOS 11 beta, but was stripped from the final release. It re-appeared and disappeared several times during the iOS 11 development cycle, and has finally made it into iOS 11.4. Let’s have a look at how iMessages are protected and how to download them from iCloud.

We also trust these companies in ways that we do not understand yet. How many of you trust Apple? No voting… Just me 🙂 Damn! OK. May I ask you a very good question. Trusting to do what? Trusting when they say: “iMessages are end-to-end encrypted”? I mean, with all of that massive security engineering, to make sure it’s as good as it can be, so they genuinely believe they’ve done that. I do, generally, they’re great people. But… people believe themselves they can defend themselves against the Russians. If the Russians specifically targeted Apple, it’s only they can defend themselves. – Ian Levy, director at the GCHQ on anniversary of the foundation of the FIPR event that was held on 29/04/2018).