Towards reliable data in the scope of unmanned aircraft systems

Abstract

The goal of a digital forensic examination is to answer legal questions in the scope of IT systems. In order to come up with accurate answers, the data of the IT system at hand needs to be reliable. While the processing of digital traces of classical operating systems like Windows and its corresponding applications is well understood (especially with respect to the reliability of traces), emerging technologies often lack such an understanding of the trustworthiness of the examined data. In this work, we address the reliability of data in the scope of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS). Although systems like UAS have become popular in various fields of application, digital forensic scientists and investigators currently lack an understanding of how to assess the correctness of UAS information, especially in the scope of Do-It-Yourself drone forensics. We shed light on common challenges when working with UAS data. Our main contribution is the introduction, explanation, and discussion of a conceptual framework to rate the reliability of UAS data. Our framework is based on three different categories representing three different levels of knowledge about the state of the UAS.