Every year since 2015, a team of dedicated individuals led by Eric Wastl organizes an online programming challenge called: Advent of Code. The concept is simple yet brilliant: from December 1st to 25th, every day a new small programming exercise is published on the adventofcode.com website. This year we want to join the fun, and bring a little bit of extra motivation for a good cause.
After two years of virtual events, we are very happy to report that the High Integrity Software Conference (HIS) will be making a physical comeback on Tuesday 11th October 2022 at the Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre, Bristol, UK. Since 2014, AdaCore has been co-organising the event with Capgemini Engineering (previously known as Altran Technologies, SA). The success and growth of the conference have ensured it remains a regular fixture for returning delegates, and the exciting lineup for this year's event will ensure HIS 2022 is no exception!
We're happy to announce our the second edition of our programming competition, the Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Award! We believe the Alire package manager is a game changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use this competition to reward the people contributing to the ecosystem.
For over 25 years, AdaCore has been committed to supporting the needs of safety- and mission-critical industries. This started with an emphasis on the Ada programming language and its toolchain, and over the years has been extended to many other technologies. AdaCore’s product offerings today include support for the Ada language and its formally verifiable SPARK subset, C and C++, and Simulink and Stateflow models. We have accomplished this while addressing the requirements of various safety standards such as DO-178B/C, EN 50128, ECSS-E-ST-40C / ECSS-Q-ST-80C, IEC 61508 and ISO 26262.
Like previous years, AdaCore will participate in FOSDEM. Once again the event will be online only, but this won’t prevent us from celebrating Open Source software and it is an opportunity for even more people to participate around the world.
NVIDIA has been using SPARK for some time now to develop safety- and security-critical firmware applications. At the recent DEF CON 29, hackers Zabrocki and Matrosov presented how they went about attacking NVIDIA firmware written in SPARK but ended up attacking the RISC-V ISA instead!Zabrocki starts by explaining the context for their red teaming exercise at NVIDIA, followed by a description of SPARK and their evaluation of the language from a security attack perspective. He shows how they used an extension of Ghidra to decompile the binary code generated by GNAT and describes the vulnerability they identified in the RISC-V ISA thanks to that decompilation. Matrosov goes on to explain how they glitched the NVIDIA chip to exploit this vulnerability. Finally, Zabrocki talks about projects used to harden RISC-V platforms.
Women make up roughly 38% of the global workforce, yet they constitute only 10–20% of the engineering workforce. In the U.S., numbers suggest that 40% of women who graduate with engineering degrees never enter the profession or eventually leave it. Why? The reasons vary but primarily involve socio-economic constraints on women in general, workplace inequities, and lack of support for work-life balance. Sadly, history itself has often failed to properly acknowledge the instrumental contributions of women inventors, scientists, and mathematicians who have helped solve some of our world's toughest challenges. How can young women emulate their successes if they don't even know about them?
Like previous years, AdaCore will participate in FOSDEM. This time the event will be online only, but this won’t prevent us from celebrating Open Source software. AdaCore engineers will give two talks in the Safety and Open Source devroom, a topic at the heart of AdaCore since its inception.
The FACE™ approach is a government-industry initiative for reducing defense system life cycle costs through portable and reusable software components. It consists of a technical approach — a software standard based on well-defined common interfaces — and a business strategy for encouraging the development and deployment of FACE conformant products.
Like last year and the year before, AdaCore will participate to the celebration of Open Source software at FOSDEM. It is always a key event for the Ada/SPARK community and we are looking forward to meet Ada enthusiasts. You can check the program of the Ada/SPARK devroom here.
What's changed?In 2019 AdaCore created a UK business unit and embarked on a new and collaborative venture researching and developing advanced UK aerospace systems. This blog introduces the reader to ‘HICLASS’, describes our involvement and explains how participation in this project is aligned with AdaCore’s core values.
The Ada Community has gathered recently around a new exciting initiative - an Ada Virtual Conference, to present Ada-related topics in a 100% remote event. The first such conference took place on August, 10th 2019, around the topic of the new features in Ada 202x. Here is what was presented.
The Danish Technical University has a yearly RoboCup where autonomous vehicles solve a number of challenges. We participated with RoadRunner, a 3D printed robot with wheel suspension, based on the BeagleBone Blue ARM-based board and the Pixy 1 camera with custom firmware enabling real-time line detection. Code is written in Ada and formally proved correct with SPARK at Silver level.
Like last year, we've sent a squad of AdaCore engineers to participate in the celebration of Open Source software at FOSDEM. Like last year, we had great interactions with the rest of the Ada and SPARK Community in the Ada devroom on Saturday. That's what we have to say about it.
Byron Cook, who founded and leads the Automated Reasoning Group at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security, gave a powerful talk at the Federated Logic Conference in July about how Amazon uses formal methods for ensuring the security of parts of AWS infrastructure. In the past four years, this group of 20+ has progressively hired well-known formal methods experts to face the growing demand inside AWS to develop tools based on formal verification for reasoning about cloud security. What is unique so far is the level of investment at AWS in formal verification as a means to radically eliminate some security problems, both for them and for their customers. This is certainly an approach we're eager to support with our own investment in the SPARK technology.
We are very proud to announce the availability of our new Ada and SPARK learning platform learn.adacore.com, which will replace AdaCoreU(niversity) e-learning platform. Learn all about it in this blog post.
Calling all members of the Ada and SPARK community, we are pleased to announce that GNAT Community 2018 is here! adacore.com/download
ANSSI, the French national security agency, has published the results of their work since 2014 on designing and implementing an open-hardware & open-source USB key that provides defense-in-depth against vulnerabilities on the USB hardware, architecture, protocol and software stack. In this project called WooKey, Ada and SPARK are key components for the security of the platform. This is a very compelling demontration of both the usability and the power of safe languages and formal verification to develop secure systems.
AdaCore has been working with CEA, Inria and NIST to organize a two-days event dedicated to sound static analysis techniques and tools, and how they are used to increase the security of software-based systems. The program gathers top-notch experts in the field, from industry, government agencies and research institutes, around the three themes of analysis of legacy code, use in new developments and accountable software quality. Here is why it is worth attending.
SPARK user Alexander Senier presented recently at BOB Konferenz in Germany their use of SPARK for building secure mobile architectures. What's nice is that they build on the guarantees that SPARK provides at software level to create a secure software architecture based on the Genode operating system framework. They present 3 interesting architectural designs that make it possible to build a trustworthy system out of untrustworthy building blocks. Almost as exciting as Alchemy's goal of transforming lead into gold! Here is the video of that presentation.
As we see the importance of software grow in applications, the quality of that software has become more and more important. Even outside the mission- and safety-critical arena customers are no longer accepting software failures (the famous blue screens of death, and there are many...). Ada has a very strong answer here and we are seeing more and more interest in using the language from a range of industries. It is for this reason that we have completed our product line by including an entry-level offer for C/C++ developers wanting to switch to Ada and reinforced our existing offer with GNAT Pro Assurance for programmers building the most robust software platforms with life cycles spanning decades.
Researcher Martin Becker is giving a SPARK tutorial next week at FDL conference. This post gives a link to his tutorial material (cookbook and slides) which I found extremely interesting.
The SPARK toolset aims at giving guarantees to its users about the properties of the software analyzed, be it absence of runtime errors or more complex properties. But the SPARK toolset being itself a complex tool, it is not free of errors. To get confidence in its results, we have worked with academic partners to establish mathematical evidence of the correctness of a critical part of the SPARK toolset. The part on which we focused is the tagging of nodes requiring run-time checks by the frontend of the SPARK technology. This work has been accepted at SEFM 2017 conference.
Two years ago, we redeveloped the code of a small quadcopter called Crazyflie in SPARK, as a proof-of-concept to show it was possible to prove absence of run-time errors (no buffer overflows, not division by zero, etc.) on such code. The researchers Martin Becker and Emanuel Regnath have raised the bar by developing the code for the autopilot of a small glider in SPARK in three months only. Their paper and slides are available, and they have released their code as FLOSS for others to use/modify/enhance!
The Frama-C & SPARK Day this week was a very successful event gathering the people interested in formal program verification for C programs (with Frama-C) and for Ada programs (with SPARK). Here is a summary of what was interesting for SPARK users. We also point to the slides of the presentations.
This year again, the VerifyThis competition took place as part of ETAPS conferences. This is the occasion for builders and users of formal program verification platforms to use their favorite tools on common challenges. The first challenge this year was a good fit for SPARK, as it revolves around proving properties of an imperative sorting procedure. In this post, I am using this challenge to show how one can reach different levels of software assurance with SPARK.
Two projects by Daniel King and Martin Becker facilitate the analysis of GNATprove results by exporting the results (either from the log or from the generated JSON files) to either Excel or JSON/text.
Rod Chapman gave an impactful presentation at Bristech conference last year. His subject: programming Satan's computer! His way of pointing out how difficult it is to produce secure software. Of course, it would not be Rod Chapman if he did not have also a few hints at how they have done it at Altran UK over the years. And SPARK is central to this solution, although it does not get mentioned explicitly in the talk! (although Rod lifts the cover in answering a question at the end)
NIST has recently published a report called "Dramatically Reducing Software Vulnerabilities" in which they single out five approaches which have the potential for creating software with 100 times fewer vulnerabilities than we do today. One of these approaches is formal methods. Among formal methods, the report highlights strong suits of SPARK, and cites SPARK projects as example of mature uses of formal methods. NIST is not the only ones to support the use of SPARK. Editor Bill Wong from Electronic Design has included SPARK in his "2016 Gifts for the Techie". So if your new year's resolutions include software without bugs, have a look at SPARK in 2017.
Researchers Carl Brandon and Peter Chapin recently presented during conference HILT 2016 their ongoing work to build a micro satellite called Lunar IceCube that will map water vapor and ice on the moon. In their paper, they explain how the use of proof with SPARK is going to help them get perfect software in the time and budget available.
Last week, a few of us at AdaCore have attended a one-day workshop organized at Thales Research and Technologies, around the topic of "Verified, trustworthy code - formal verification of software". Attendees from many different branches of Thales (avionics, railway, security, networks) were given an overview of the state-of-practice in formal verification of software, focused on two technologies: the SPARK technology that we develop at AdaCore for programs in Ada, and the Frama-C technology developed at CEA research labs for programs in C. The most interesting part of the day was the feedback given by three operational teams who have experimented during a few months with either SPARK (two teams) or Frama-C (one team). The lessons learned by first-time adopters of such technologies are quite valuable.
Ready for a bloody comparison between technologies underlying the tools for SPARK 2014 vs Frama-C vs Why3? Nothing like that in that article we wrote with developers of the Why3 and Frama-C toolsets. In fact, it's a bloody good comparison really, that emphasizes the differences and benefits in each technology.
Researchers from Dependable Computing and Zephyr Software LLC have presented at the latest NASA Formal Methods conference last week their work on proving security of binary programs. In this work, they use SPARK as intermediate language and GNATprove as proof tool, which is an atypical and interesting use of the SPARK technology.
AdaCore continues to build reliable and secure software for embedded software development tools. Last month, we attended Embedded World 2016, one of the largest conferences of its kind in Europe, to present our embedded solutions and our expertise for safety, and mission critical applications in a variety of domains.
RSSR is a new conference focused on the development and verification of railway systems. We will present there how SPARK can be used to write abstract software specifications, whose refinement in terms of concrete implementation can be proved automatically using SPARK tools.
We are pleased to announce that we will be a major sponsor and exhibitor at ERTS, Toulouse and will be exhibiting at Embedded World, Nuremberg in the coming months!
The three of us attended the Ada Lovelace Symposium in Oxford (UK). The two days were one fantastic discovery after another about the life, achievements and legacy of Ada Lovelace, the programming pioneer who lent her name to the Ada language.
We are excited to be sponsoring and exhibiting at the 2nd annual High Integrity Software conference, taking place on 5th November 2015 at The Royal Marriott Hotel in Bristol.
AdaCore has a long history of providing tools and support to develop mission critical applications for Space. Check out this video we made and showed at the conference to see which ones!
Project-P Open Workshop
In a recent article in Communications of the ACM, Carl Landwehr, a renowned scientific expert on security, defends the view that the software engineering community is doing overall a poor job at securing our global information system and that this is mostly avoidable by putting what we know works to work, to the point that most vulnerabilities could be completely avoided by design if we cared enough. Shocking! Or so it should appear.
Embedded News TV caught up with our own Matteo Bordin to talk about QGen. Matteo provides a nice overview of QGen and it's position in the industry as the need for safe and secure software becomes increasingly important.
20 Years of AdaCore: Company as Committed as Ever on Safety-Critical Software Solutions
For lovers of verification tools and critical system (we know you're out there!), we are very excited to present ProofInUse!
If you have a passion for Ada, need more information on our technology or would just like to have a chat, there are a couple of upcoming events where we'd love to meet up. What's more, we'll be launching our brand new product QGen at Embedded World!
I'm proud, if not a bit nervous, to be the one firing the very first post on this brand new blog. Why are we starting a corporate blog at this time? There are many reasons for this. The main one is that there are many things happening at AdaCore and around the GNAT technology and we are seeking better ways to make them widely known while offering interested recipients the possibility to react and interact with us.
Correctness of robot software is a challenge. Just proving the absence of run-time errors (AoRTE) in robot software is a challenge big enough that even NASA has not solved it. Researchers have used SPARK to do precisely that for 3 well-known robot navigation algorithms. Their results will be presented at the major robotics conference IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2014) this coming September.
In this article, we provide a short introduction to our paper at the Test and Proof 2014 conference in York, UK.
Using SPARK or any other formal method in a certification requires that the applicant agrees with the certification authority on the verification objectives that this use of formal methods allows to reach, and how this is obtained and documented. In order to facilitate this process, the participants to the workshop on Theorem Proving in Certification have produced a draft set of guidelines, now publicly available.