At this year's CYBERUK, AdaCore had the privilege of being part of the UKRI Digital Security by Design (DSbD) stand, demonstrating its part of Secure Avionics by Design (SAbD): CHERI Software Architecture on the Arm Prototype Morello Board.The event allowed us to display our software-oriented demonstration to a global government and industry leaders audience.
When Latitude began creating their small satellite launcher, Zephyr, they recognized the importance of selecting the correct programming language and development tools to support their efforts. They chose to work with high-integrity software experts AdaCore.Latitude, which closed a Series B funding round in January 2024, is currently preparing for Zephyr's first flight, which will occur in late 2025.In this article, Jose Ruiz, a Product Manager at AdaCore, explores two essential factors to consider when selecting secure software for your space industry projects: memory-safe languages and formal verification.
Many of our customers ask if we have a "Coding Standard" that we can provide for writing code in Ada or SPARK. The answer has typically been: "We provide GNATcheck, which you can use to create your own." While this provides a lot of flexibility and control to the end user, sometimes a developer just wants to get things up and running as quickly as possible, and a generic coding standard is all that's needed. That's why AdaCore decided to help by creating a baseline coding standard that you can use as-is, or modify to fit your needs.
Nicolas Setton, our Head of User Experience, has experienced working in multiple different AdaCore offices over his 20+ year engineering career. Find out more about Nicolas’ career at AdaCore and what it’s like to work across two different continents.
The software review is an essential part of the evidence required for certification according to DO-178C. In this blog post we reflect on the objectives and challenges regarding DO-178C compliance.
A few days ago, someone posted a request for the Abacus Commodore 64 Ada compiler on the reddit Ada channel. After a quick look at the manual I decided to give it a try using a C64 emulator. How hard can it be?
Like any other company, AdaCore contributes to climate change through its activities. We recognize that it is our responsibility to reduce this negative impact, and we've been on a path to make measurable concrete progress in the reduction of our GHG emissions since 2019. In this post, we are describing our current progress and plans forward.
Every 8th March, International Women’s Day is celebrated around the world - it’s a great opportunity to highlight women’s talents, their achievements, and what makes them great at what they do.This year’s theme is #InspireInclusion. At AdaCore, this got us thinking about what our team values the most and how we strive to create a sense of belonging and community, no matter who our people are, their level of seniority, or where they’re based.Viviane Garese and Sofia Casale reveal more about their career journeys, their accomplishments in Software Engineering and Sales, and how AdaCore’s core value of collaboration helps to inspire inclusion at work every day.
The focus on enhancing cybersecurity through various technological approaches and methodologies, as detailed in the White House Office of the National Cyber Director’s (ONCD) document titled “Back to the Building Blocks: A Path Toward Secure and Measurable Software" underscores a pivotal shift in how organizations, especially those at the helm of technological innovation, must adapt and respond to the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats. This document provides an overview of some strategies and technologies that are critical in bolstering cybersecurity defenses.
I am delighted to announce that the Communications of the ACM has published a paper on SPARK: “Co-Developing Programs and Their Proof of Correctness”. The paper provides a comprehensive and up-to-date presentation of SPARK; as such, it’s a great reference to share with anyone - in industry, academia, or anywhere in between - who might like to know more about SPARK.
Efficient embedded development in Ada relies on powerful tools. Real-time logging plays a pivotal role, enabling live monitoring and analysis. Unlike traditional methods, SEGGER's Real-Time Transfer (RTT) method offers hardware-independent real-time logging with low latency.This article explores RTT's simplicity: storing protocol data in a ring buffer on the target device, read by the debugger without halting program execution. The provided Ada code showcases RTT's implementation, from buffer types to control blocks.Integration with development environments is seamless, as seen with the Cortex Debug extension for VS Code. The extension supports RTT, providing features like textual and graphical display of RTT stream data.In summary, SEGGER's RTT method is a powerful, hardware-independent solution for real-time logging in Ada development. Its efficiency and flexibility make it indispensable for debugging, error detection, and security in embedded systems. Explore the GitHub repository for a hands-on experience with RTT in Ada embedded development.
While foundational to the internet, the traditional DNS system has its vulnerabilities. Threats such as DNS spoofing and cache poisoning pose significant risks to the integrity and authenticity of DNS data. DNSSEC is designed to address this risk.
You may have noticed that over the past two years, we have made significant updates to our CodePeer product - the most visible change being the renaming of the product itself, now branded as “GNAT Static Analysis Suite”. For those who are already using the product and are looking to use the new version, it may be a good time to step back and share our vision, at AdaCore, for static analysis.
In 2023 we announced the third edition of the Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Awards. We see the Alire source package manager as a game changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use the Crate of the Year awards to honor the people contributing to the ecosystem. This edition was different from the previous ones: we decided to depart from a submissions-based approach and instead consider all crates available in the Alire ecosystem. Today we are pleased to announce the results.
Informally, memory safety in a program means that each data access is well behaved; i.e., is consistent with the item’s data type, does not impinge on any storage locations beyond the data value’s boundaries, and, if the program is multithreaded, does not produce an inconsistent or corrupted value. Memory safety violations result in undefined behavior, which is a Bad Thing: instances like the notorious “buffer overrun” can turn an otherwise safe and secure program into a ticking virtual time bomb. Some of the most eventful malware attacks in recent years are due to memory safety violations, and the topic has moved from techno-geek subreddits into mainstream discourse. Anyone developing or acquiring software, especially for applications with high assurance requirements, needs to pay attention.
In a significant stride towards bolstering the security of the open-source ecosystem, AdaCore has recently contributed a set of security hardening features to the GCC project (GNU Compiler Collection). These features, designed to fortify the software produced by GCC against various cyber threats, highlight our commitment to advancing the field of secure programming and our 30+ years of contributing to the open-source software development ecosystem.
Some time ago, we announced some updates to the learn website. In the meantime, we published the Introduction To Embedded Systems Programming course and the initial parts of the Advanced Journey with Ada course. Today, we'd like to announce some updates that have been made to the learn website since then.
At the end of November we called the Ada and SPARK programmers community to take on a challenge for a good cause. For each person completing one of the Advent of Code exercises using the Ada programming language, AdaCore would donate $10 to the Ada Developers Academy. And for those willing to go an extra mile, AdaCore would donate $20 if the solution is implemented in SPARK. We are now in January and it is time for the results!
We're thrilled to kick off the holiday season with the second edition of Advent of Ada, a programming challenge that not only tests your coding skills but also contributes to a meaningful cause.As many of you know, Advent of Code has become a beloved tradition since its inception in 2015. 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. Participants get points for each completed exercise.
This is the first part of a series in which we’ll implement a GNAT SAS analysis pipeline for Ada code on GitLab by making use of GNAT SAS 24 new features. We are focusing on getting a pipeline that "Just Works(tm)", leaving more advanced issues such as scalability, improvement of user experience, or maintainability for later.
