Practical Mobile Forensics - Fourth Edition

Short Message Service (SMS) messages

The SMS database contains text and multimedia messages that were sent from and received by the device, along with the phone number of the remote party, date and time, and other carrier information. Starting with iOS 5, iMessage data is also stored in the SMS database. iMessage allows users to send SMS and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) messages over a cellular or Wi-Fi network to other iOS or macOS users, thus providing an alternative to SMS. The SMS database can be found at /HomeDomain/Library/SMS/sms.db.

You can run the following queries in DB4S to parse the SMS messages. Afterward, you can export it into a .csv file, as shown in the following screenshot:

Examining sms.db in DB4S

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