Unmanned aerial vehicle digital forensic investigation

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, a seven-phase UAV digital forensics investigation framework is proposed to standardize the investigation process for UAVs. The framework was tested on the DJI Phantom III Professional UAV which is one of the most popular commercial UAVs in the market. Three kinds of forensic artifacts are found on the sample UAV and these artifacts are examined deeply. Two of these 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, the flight paths for all the flights taken by the investigated UAV, could be derived. At the end of the whole investigation process, it is observed that the proposed seven-phased investigation framework works successfully and significantly helps with the forensic investigation of UASs in a systematic manner.