Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Digital Forensic Investigation Framework
İbrahim Gülataş, Selçuk Baktır · DergiPark (Istanbul University) · 2018
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology is arapidly emerging technology and it has found widespread usage. While UAVs arestill in their development phase without any existing commonly acceptedstandards for their underlying technologies and their forensic investigation,they have an increasing record of criminal usage. This urges the researchcommunity to develop techniques to detect and prevent illegal usage of UAVs. Withthis work, we present a seven-phase UAV digital forensics investigationframework to standardize the investigation process for UAVs. We tested our frameworkon the DJI Phantom III Professional UAV which is one of the most popularcommercial UAVs in the market. We found three kinds of forensic artifacts onthe sample UAV and these artifacts examined deeply. Two of the artifacts arelog files stored as binary files and the other artifact is the EXIF header ofthe images that are captured by UAV's onboard camera. The log files of the UAVhas a proprietary data structure. By reverse engineering this data structure,we able to derive the flight paths for all the flights taken by theinvestigated UAV.