The secured military drone framework is undergoing final rounds of inter-ministerial consultations, including with the Ministries of Home Affairs and Civil Aviation, and is expected to be released in a month, or at the latest, before the end of this year, Director General of Acquisition A Anbarasu said about the long-awaited policy.

The “Framework for Testing Security Vulnerabilities in Drones” to audit security vulnerabilities in the Ariel platform that are to be acquired by defence forces was first published way back in March 2025, which was subsequent to businessline’s expose on August 27, 2024, highlighting concerns over Chinese spares and components slipping into UAVs up for acquisition.

“We are consulting DGCA (Director General of Civil Aviation) and MHA (Ministry of Home Affairs) and others also. I don’t know the details, but the final consultation is taking place. The draft has already been circulated,” Anbarasu told this newspaper on the sidelines of an event.

When asked when the framework is expected, the DG remarked, “in a month or two. The outer line is before this year end.”

The urgency of establishing this framework stems from the fact that the defence forces are procuring drones in large quantities with a wide range of combat capabilities, from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions to kamikaze strikes. In the absence of this policy, an architecture, however, has been created for acquiring secured drones.

The Army Design Bureau, tasked with authoring the framework, resubmitted the revised draft to the Ministry of Defence more than three months ago after incorporating multiple feedbacks from the industry, government and other stakeholders.

Sources said that the final draft will be submitted to the DG Acquisition and Defence Secretary RK Singh for the last round of vetting ahead of its release.

Industry sources said in the present drone procurement, the Army is looking for hack-proof drones for operations that can function in an electronic framework (EW) contested environment.

“They technically call it ECCM (Electronic Counter-Countermeasure) enabled drones. They are also demanding drones with software that can be upgraded to have enhanced security measures when required at a later stage,” said the owner of a private company who has supplied drones to one of the tri-services.

Another private company, CMD, pointed out the lack of standard security architecture in the framework. Due to that, forces and units are applying their own security understanding of EW resilient drones, which may raise interoperability challenges in case of any face-off, he cautioned.

The proposed framework demands more than 20 tests from accredited labs to ensure only genuine indigenous drones are manufactured in the country to meet security standards, businessline had reported earlier. It is a modified version of OSWASP 4.0 – the international security application standards for testing evidence of vulnerabilities in devices.

The upcoming policy will roll in from the beginning of the acquisition process — right from request for information (RFI) to request for proposal (RFP) — and continue through the post-contract management, with testing to be carried out by STQC IT Services, ETDC Bangalore, and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Published on October 18, 2026