Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Kill Chain: Purple Teaming Tactics

The raising accessibility of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), colloquially known as drones, is rapidly increasing. Drones have pros and cons like any other technologies that operate on different communication protocols (i.e., Network, Bluetooth, Satellite, etc.). Recent studies have discussed challenges that may come in tow with the growing use of such technology. These studies note that in-depth examination is required, especially when addressing challenges that carry a high volume of software data between sensors, actuators, and control commands. From a security perspective, the technology has not achieved reliable security measures. This is due to many factors such as different operating systems to operate the drone. Drones run on different hardware and software components, which pose yet another series of challenges in both the drone forensic process and incident response. This paper examines a VTI Phoenix drone by utilizing the `Purple-Teaming' tactics, presents challenges related to drone forensic discovery and discusses potential drone anti-forensic techniques and their association with the type of use, environment, attack vector, and level of expertise. To this end, we proposed the UAV Kill Chain based on the conducted examination and the presented scientific contribution in this work. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been any contribution that incorporates `Purple-Teaming' tactics to evaluate UAV-related research in cybersecurity and digital forensics.