Extracting information from a drone using DroneXtract

2 days ago2 min read

A drone hovers in a dim, foggy room, shining a light on a device below. The scene is bluish with soft lighting, creating a mysterious mood.

Contents of the article

What is DroneXtract
Parsing DJI files
Steganography
Telemetry visualization
Flight and integrity analysis
Installing and using DroneXtract
Conclusion

DroneXtract is a unique tool in the world of digital forensics designed to analyze and study DJI drones. Let's see what he can do.

More on the topic: How to take over control of a drone

What is DroneXtract

DroneXtract is a DJI drone digital forensics tool written in Golang. It can be used to analyze sensor and telemetry data, visualize drone flight maps, conduct audits for criminal activity, and extract relevant data from various file formats

DroneXtract digital forensics toolkit interface displaying options for file parsing and telemetry mapping. Blue text on black background.

DroneXtract has four main modules for drone inspection and auditing. These include the following:

Parsing DJI files

You can visualize and extract information from DJI file formats such as CSV, KML and GPX.

Drone telemetry data display with coordinates, altitude, speed, and satellite count. Blue text on dark background, tech interface style.

The received information can be saved in various formats. The image below shows an example of the parsed output file and the type of data extracted from the file.

Steganography

Steganography is the process of revealing information stored in files. DroneXtract's steganography module allows you to extract telemetry and valuable data from images and videos.

Screen displaying EXIF data, including light source, ISO, exposure settings, and file date. Text in a console-style interface.

Additionally, the extracted data can be exported to four different file formats.

Telemetry visualization

The telemetry visualization kit contains a flight path display generator and a telemetry graph visualizer. The flight path display generator creates a map image showing the places the drone visited along its route and the route it flew.

Graph with blue steps on a black background, showing height above takeoff in feet from 0 to 292198. Labels on the left and bottom.

The Telemetry Graph Visualizer plots a graph for each of the relevant telemetry or sensor values to use for auditing purposes.

Flight and integrity analysis

The flight and integrity analysis tool looks at all telemetry values recorded by the drone during flight. Once the values are collected, it calculates the maximum error expected for the given value and checks for suspicious gaps in the data.

Flight analysis display showing various metrics like speed, distance, voltage, and compass heading, in green text on a black background.

This tool can be used to check for anomalous data or possible file corruption.

Installing and using DroneXtract

First you need to install Golang .

DroneXtract can be launched by running the following commands in a terminal after cloning the code from the GitHub :

$ export GO111MODULE=on

$ go get ./...

$ go run main.go

Conclusion

Drones have revolutionized many industries, but their potential use by malicious actors can lead to serious problems. To prevent cyberattacks on drones and gain a deeper understanding of the strategies used by cybercriminals, digital forensics is a key defense tool to initiate investigations and extensive security research to identify the causes of these attacks.