Flight log analysis and recovery for open-source drones: Focusing on ArduPilot, PX4, and Betaflight

초록

During the past few years, the drone market has grown significantly, with drones widely utilized in military operations, weather observation, photography, recreation, entertainment, and emergency response. Alongside commercial ready-to-fly drones, demand for open-source drones has risen, allowing users to build custom hardware and firmware. As open-source drones enable low-cost customization, their adoption has steadily increased. Meanwhile, the rise in illegal drone activities has highlighted the need for anti-drone and forensic investigation methods. Although research on flight log extraction and analysis is actively conducted for commercial drones such as DJI's products, studies on open-source drones remain limited. This paper focuses on three widely used open-source drone firmware: ArduPilot, PX4, and Betaflight. We conduct an in-depth analysis of log file formats used by open-source firmware-based drones. Additionally, this study proposes a practical method for carving deleted log records containing key information that remain in the unallocated space of a drone's storage device, specifically addressing situations where evidence spoliation has occurred. Based on this research, we introduce an open-source drone forensic tool, FLARE, which enables forensic analysis of flight logs generated by open-source drones. The tool not only interprets critical log types used in drone investigations, but also provides functionality to recover flight log records from partial data remnants left on the drone's storage device.

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