Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Digital Forensic Investigation Framework

Year 2018, Volume: 14 Issue: 1, 32 - 53, 30.04.2018

İbrahim Gülataş , Selçuk Baktır

Abstract

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology is a
rapidly emerging technology and it has found widespread usage. While UAVs are
still in their development phase without any existing commonly accepted
standards for their underlying technologies and their forensic investigation,
they have an increasing record of criminal usage. This urges the research
community to develop techniques to detect and prevent illegal usage of UAVs. With
this work, we present a seven-phase UAV digital forensics investigation
framework to standardize the investigation process for UAVs. We tested our framework
on the DJI Phantom III Professional UAV which is one of the most popular
commercial UAVs in the market. We found three kinds of forensic artifacts on
the sample UAV and these artifacts examined deeply. Two of the artifacts are
log files stored as binary files and the other artifact is the EXIF header of
the images that are captured by UAV's onboard camera. The log files of the UAV
has a proprietary data structure. By reverse engineering this data structure,
we able to derive the flight paths for all the flights taken by the
investigated UAV.

Keywords

Digital Forensic Investigation, Embedded Devices Forensics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Forensics

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