AdaCore Blog

An Insight Into the AdaCore Ecosystem

by Yannick Moy –

Research Corner - FLOSS Glider Software in SPARK

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!

#Formal Verification    #Dev Projects    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy –

Research Corner - Floating-Point Computations in SPARK

It is notoriously hard to prove properties of floating-point computations, including the simpler bounding properties that state safe bounds on the values taken by entities in the program. Thanks to the recent changes in SPARK 17, users can now benefit from much better provability for these programs, by combining the capabilities of different provers. For the harder cases, this requires using ghost code to state intermediate assertions proved by one of the provers, to be used by others. This work is described in an article which was accepted at VSTTE 2017 conference.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy –
New Guidance for Adoption of SPARK

New Guidance for Adoption of SPARK

While SPARK has been used for years in companies like Altran UK, companies without the same know-how may find it intimidating to get started on formal program verification. To help with that process, AdaCore has collaborated with Thales throughout the year 2016 to produce a 70-pages detailed guidance document for the adoption of SPARK. These guidelines are based on five levels of assurance that can be achieved on software, in increasing order of costs and benefits: Stone level (valid SPARK), Bronze level (initialization and correct data flow), Silver level (absence of run-time errors), Gold level (proof of key properties) and Platinum level (full functional correctness). These levels, and their mapping to the Development Assurance Levels (DAL) and Safety Integrity Levels (SIL) used in certification standards, were presented at the recent High Confidence Software and Systems conference.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy –
(Many) More Low Hanging Bugs

(Many) More Low Hanging Bugs

We reported in a previous post our initial experiments to create lightweight checkers for Ada source code, based on the new Libadalang technology. The two checkers we described discovered 12 issues in the codebase of the tools we develop at AdaCore. In this post, we are reporting on 6 more lightweight checkers, which have discovered 114 new issues in our codebase. This is definitely showing that these kind of checkers are worth integrating in static analysis tools, and we look forward to integrating these and more in our static analyzer CodePeer for Ada programs.

#Static Analysis    #Libadalang   

by Yannick Moy , Emmanuel Briot , Nicolas Roche –
A Usable Copy-Paste Detector in A Few Lines of Python

A Usable Copy-Paste Detector in A Few Lines of Python

After we created lightweight checkers based on the recent Libadalang technology developed at AdaCore, a colleague gave us the challenge of creating a copy-paste detector based on Libadalang. It turned out to be both easier than anticipated, and much more efficient and effective than we could have hoped for. In the end, we hope to use this new detector to refactor the codebase of some of our tools, and we expect to integrate it in our IDEs.

#Libadalang    #Static Analysis    #refactoring   

by Yannick Moy –

VerifyThis Challenge in SPARK

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.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy –

GNATprove Tips and Tricks: Proving the Ghost Common Divisor (GCD)

Euclid's algorithm for computing the greatest common divisor of two numbers is one of the first ones we learn in school, and also one of the first algorithms that humans devised. So it's quite appealing to try to prove it with an automatic proving toolset like SPARK. It turns out that proving it automatically is not so easy, just like understanding why it works is not so easy. In this post, I am using ghost code to prove correct implementations of the GCD, starting from a naive linear search algorithm and ending with Euclid's algorithm.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Jorge Real (Universitat Politècnica de València) – Guest Author
Writing on Air

Writing on Air

While searching for motivating projects for students of the Real-Time Systems course here at Universitat Politècnica de València, we found a curious device that produces a fascinating effect. It holds a 12 cm bar from its bottom and makes it swing, like an upside-down pendulum, at a frequency of nearly 9 Hz. The free end of the bar holds a row of eight LEDs. With careful and timely switching of those LEDs, and due to visual persistence, it creates the illusion of text... floating in the air!

#STM32    #Ravenscar    #Ada    #Makers    #Embedded Development   

by Fabien Chouteau , Arnaud Charlet , Yannick Moy –
SPARK Tetris on the Arduboy

SPARK Tetris on the Arduboy

One of us got hooked on the promise of a credit-card-size programmable pocket game under the name of Arduboy and participated in its kickstarter in 2015. The kickstarter was successful (but late) and delivered  the expected working board in mid 2016. Of course, the idea from the start was to program it in Ada , but this is an 8-bits AVR microcontroller (the ATmega32u4 by Atmel) not supported anymore by GNAT Pro. One solution would have been to rebuild our own GNAT compiler for 8-bit AVR from the GNAT FSF repository and use the AVR-Ada project. Another solution, which we explore in this blog post, is to use the SPARK-to-C compiler that we developed at AdaCore to turn our Ada code into C and then use the Arduino toolchain to compile for the Arduboy board.

by Claire Dross –

Research Corner - Auto-active Verification in SPARK

GNATprove performs auto-active verification, that is, verification is done automatically, but usually requires annotations by the user to succeed. In SPARK, annotations are most often given in the form of contracts (pre and postconditions). But some language features, in particular ghost code, allow proof guidance to be much more involved. In a paper we are presenting at NASA Formal Methods symposium 2017, we describe how an imperative red black tree implementation in SPARK was verified using intensive auto-active verification.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy –

Rod Chapman on Software Security

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)

#Security    #SPARK