Screentime Notifications in Catalina (10.15)

If you routinely perform mac forensics, you've probably done a few macOS Catalina (10.15) examinations already. And if you are the kind that verifies your data, you may have noticed that for ScreenTime notifications the databases don't show you the same strings that you see in the actual displayed Notification and several forensic tools don't either.

Let's explore why.

To start with, lets review the format of the Notifications database. For macOS High Sierra (10.) and above, it is located at:

/private/var/folders/<xx>/<yyyyyyy>/0/com.apple.notificationcenter/db2/db

where the <xx>/<yyyyyy> portion represents what might appear like random strings, but they are not random. This folder path represents the DARWIN_USER_DIR for a specific user. For more details on this read my old post here.

Inside the database, the record table holds the actual notification data (title, sub-title, body) and date of notification among other fields. A simple database query can get the useful data.

SELECT 
  (SELECT identifier FROM app WHERE app.app_id=record.app_id) as app,
  uuid, data, presented, delivered_date
FROM record

The actual notification data is within a plist stored in the column data. Inside this plist, you can easily navigate to the items titl, subt and body to get the title, sub-title and body. However for screentime notifications, the data looks different. Instead of individual strings in these values, they are lists.

Figure 2 - Embedded plist for screentime notification

Screentime uses format strings and a list of data, which needs to be put back together. This is similar to how Event logs in windows or Unified logging in macOS works. The format strings are located at the paths shown below (for english) and are available in other languages too:

/System/Library/UserNotifications/Bundles/com.apple.ScreenTimeNotifications.bundle/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/Localizable.strings
/System/Library/UserNotifications/Bundles/com.apple.ScreenTimeNotifications.bundle/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/InfoPlist.strings

These files are plists which consist of a single dictionary each. So WeeklyReportNotificationNegativeDeltaBody seen in plist above resolves to the message :
"Your screen time was down %@ last week, for an average of %@ a day." The %@ will be replaced with data provided (15% and 6 hours, 24 minutes) becoming:
"Your screen time was down 15% last week, for an average of 6 hours, 24 minutes a day."

Figure 3 - Snippet of Localizable.strings plist

Similarly WeeklyReportNotificationTitle becomes Weekly Report Available. So now, we are able to reconstruct the complete original message.

mac_apt's NOTIFICATIONS plugin has now been updated with this functionality.