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.

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