We’re all aware of how much information the user’s Apple Account may contain. Backups, passwords, photos, calls and a lot more are collected and stored in iCloud. After celebgate, Apple has implemented several countermeasures to downloading iCloud backups: 2FA, regular changes to iCloud protocols and data encryption, account locks due to suspicious activities, moving to GSA (Grand Slam Authentication), improvements to authentication tokens generation and encryption and much more — so now iCloud backups are more or less secure (though there is still a way to download them).
At the same time, Apple moves more data into iCloud (and cloud syncing becomes closer to what Google was doing for years). Starting with iOS 11, both text messages (SMS) and iMessages are now kept in iCloud and synchronized seamlessly across devices. This brings us to the challenge of accessing these messages in iCloud. Technically, they are also stored on iCloud Drive (as all other synced data, as well as backups and iCloud Photo Library), but harder to access.
This talk will cover what you need to access Messages and how to extract them from iCloud: it’s not about the password anymore!