Abstract:

 

The development of drone technology has revolutionized various sectors, including mapping, agriculture, and tourism. However, on the other hand, this expansion also facilitates the misuse of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for illegal activities that threaten public safety and national security. Digital forensic investigations face challenges when drones are damaged or destroyed. This research addresses this gap by focusing on the forensic analysis of Android mobile controllers used in DJI drones, which dominate the commercial market. We developed a new open-source parser integrated into the Android Logs Events and Protobuf Parser (ALEAPP) platform, specifically designed to decode and extract flight data from .DAT and .TXT log files. Our comprehensive analysis covers various DJI drone models (Mavic 2, Mavic 2 Enterprise, Mavic Air, Mavic Pro, Phantom 3, Phantom 4, and Phantom 4 Pro) to recovery of forensic evidence in the form of flight timestamps and GPS coordinates.