Comment by WatchDog
6 years ago
Are iMessage communications signed with an apple device specific key? I imagine part of the reason that it has proven to be so difficult to reverse engineer, is that it somehow utilises an apple devices secure enclave?
It uses some combination of the serial number and the NIC (at least on Macs, probably not on iOS) to authenticate with Apple. That's why it's fiddly on Hackintoshes.
They couldn't use the enclave because not all currently supported Macs have it, but maybe in 10 years when all of the old ones fall off the support tree.