Reverse Engineering Apple's typedstream Format: Inside imessage-exporter

This article details the reverse engineering of Apple's proprietary binary serialization protocol, typedstream, undertaken by the imessage-exporter project. Typedstream, used for storing iMessage data, is undocumented and not part of Apple's public APIs. By analyzing BLOB data in the iMessage database, the author identified patterns within the typedstream format, such as 0x84 marking the beginning of a data block with the subsequent byte indicating length, and 0x86 signifying the end of a block. Using these patterns, the author successfully deserialized the typedstream data, achieving cross-platform access to iMessage data.