SkyNeXt - Hacking The Skies

A Deep Dive Into SkyNeXt

In this gitbook, we have already gone over the first technology that was built using SkyLine, now it's time to seriously move things up a bit more. What further can you go than standard smart TVs? Well, you can touch the NeXt thing in IoT->Automobiles and UAVs. So, that is what this is about.

SkyNeXt: Hacking The Skies NeXt

This framework is useful for a few things and exists for a few reasons which are actually listed below.

• Contribution To The UAS Security World --> Let both face it, UAV and UAS forensics does not actually become used much- I mean, there are some case studies in the same way that analyzing vehicles is worth it- but as hackers, we are not always trying to investigate a drones info, even then, there are some massive frameworks that are private already out there which are built by UAV/UAS investigators. But, this was a nice contribution to the open source comm.

• Competitive Tooling --> The one thing the members of SkyPenguin-Labs strive to do is absolutely slaughter competition when it comes to tool development. When the owner, along with various other teams affiliated with SkyPenguin-Labs pointed out some popular UAS/UAV frameworks that were let us say, "too popular"- we decided to make our own. Not only would we make it better and faster, but much more versatile, much more unique, much nicer, and also much more "useable".

• SkyLine Experimentation --> Since SkyLine is still being built and worked on as well as its idea, it is important that we write some active experiments on the language instead of just pushing out updates without proof. So, this was also a good opportunity to experiment with SkyLines file and data manipulation libraries as well as graphical and digital visualization libraries. Another important factor was also testing the analysis side of SkyLine. Is it really that fast or is it horrible at pattern matching?

• Educational Side --> The one thing SkyLine also works to do is educate the fuck out of people that may not know specific functionalities can exist. So, SkyNeXt uses SkyLine as a core programming to educate people on the world of UAS/UAV investigations by explaining how image formats (JPG/JPEG/GIF/MP3/MP4/MOV/DNG), video formats (MP4/MOV), data formats (KML/GPX/XML/JSON/YAML/WL), Network Formats (NLOG/LOG/TLOG), and other file formats work within UAS/UAV systems.

There are also other various reasons why this framework was developed and the main reason was to show this community something different, something new, something fun, something intelligent, and something much more versatile.

SkyNeXt: What It Can Do

The framework is very vague on what it can do from the outside, but here are some examples of what the framework can do.

• Data Visualization: Statistics gathered by our team that was heavily analyzed seemed to understand that data visualization in UAS/UAV forensics was okay- for specific reasons. One of the reasons was that if they were command-line visualizations, they broke often or did not generate well enough and if they were server-based / web-based then they would lag heavily when plotting data. Well, with data visualization improvements, SkyNeXt will be able to universally map out data in both WEB and CLI-based formats such as plotting on maps and graphs using custom libraries.

• Data Translation: One thing our team also noticed was that data translation was actually lacking heavily. We did this a bit with Caster and kind of proofed it in a document about SkyLine. Data translation is extremely important for versatility when operating with other tools and also allows for scanned data to become more universal. Other tools would just break when trying to map the data to specific formats and this became a HUGE issue. Using the algorithms built into SkyLine, we were able to build universal parsers that parsed complex documents and translated them to other formats. Patterns were also easy to work with during translation (XML->JSON, CSV, TXT, KML, GPX | *->*). The *-* is basically saying that all data formats can be translated to each other.

• Binary Analysis: Binary analysis is a huge thing in UAS/UAV forensics because we need to analyze specific sets of firmware using firmware-analysis techniques. Well, SkyNeXt can automate this with specific tools such as its ELF/PE tools and its ability to scan and highlight important parts within binary applications.

• Image Analysis: Image analysis is another huge thing. The cool thing about SkyLine is that libraries already exist for parsing ELF, PE, BPLIST, PLIST, XML, JSON, YAML, CSV, PNG, JPG, JPEG, GIF, DNG, and many other file formats. I mean it is so insanely easy to translate data and already easy to both inject and extract metadata from a JPG or PNG image. There are also libraries to inject and hide specific payloads- so that being said, there are also parts of that library that work for image analysis. The ability to detect some steganographic patterns and the ability to extract metadata such as EXIF metadata from the images extracted from drones.