Investigating Drone Data Recovery Beyond the Obvious Using Digital Forensics

The rapid advancement of drone technology has opened up new opportunities across a wide range of sectors, including agriculture, surveillance, and delivery services. Specifically, the accessibility and affordability of drones suggest a surge in their prevalence in the coming years. Nonetheless, this growth opened new doors for bad actors to use drones for nefarious activities; thereby, raising safety and security concerns attributed to the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this paper, we focus on systematically investigating the data recovery mechanisms for confiscated drones. First, we discuss the potential security threats associated with the drones and different detection methods to spot drones. Then, we propose a structured data recovery framework to effectively retrieve crucial data from a malicious drone. In particular, we analyze the popular DJI Mini 2 SE drone and show how our proposed framework can facilitate forensic investigators to uncover crucial data beyond the drone’s metadata. Our experiments show that investigators can effectively recover sensitive historical data that was even deleted from the drone’s external secure digital (SD) card.