AdaCore Blog

88 entries tagged with #Language

by Quentin Ochem

Proving Memory Operations - A SPARK Journey

The promise behind the SPARK language is the ability to formally demonstrate properties in your code regardless of the input values that are supplied - as long as those values satisfy specified constraints. As such, this is quite different from static analysis tools such as our CodePeer or the typical offering available for e.g. the C language, which trade completeness for efficiency in the name of pragmatism. Indeed, the problem they’re trying to solve - finding bugs in existing applications - makes it impossible to be complete. Or, if completeness is achieved, then it is at the cost of massive amount of uncertainties (“false alarms”). SPARK takes a different approach. It requires the programmer to stay within the boundaries of a (relatively large) Ada language subset and to annotate the source code with additional information - at the benefit of being able to be complete (or sound) in the verification of certain properties, and without inundating the programmer with false alarms.

by Pamela Trevino

Public Ada Training Paris, France Dec 3 - 7, 2018

This course is geared to software professionals looking for a practical introduction to the Ada language with a focus on embedded systems, including real-time features as well as critical features introduced in Ada 2012. By attending this course you will understand and know how to use Ada for both sequential and concurrent applications, through a combination of live lectures from AdaCore's expert instructors and hands-on workshops using AdaCore's latest GNAT technology. AdaCore will provide an Ada 2012 tool-chain and ARM-based target boards for embedded workshops. No previous experience with Ada is required.

by Julia Teissl

Train control using Ada on a Raspberry Pi

I was looking for a topic for my master thesis in embedded systems engineering when one of my advisor proposed the idea of programming a control system for autonomous trains in Ada. Since I am fascinated by the idea of autonomous vehicles I agreed immediately without knowing Ada. 

by Yannick Moy

How Ada and SPARK Can Increase the Security of Your Software

There is a long-standing debate about which phase in the Software Development Life Cycle causes the most bugs: is it the specification phase or the coding phase? A recent study by NIST shows that, in the software industry at large, coding bugs are causing the majority of security issues. Choosing a safer language like Ada or SPARK is a critical component for reducing these vulnerabilities that result from simple mistakes. In a new freely available booklet, we explain how these languages and the associated toolsets can be used to increase the security of software.

#Ada    #SPARK    #Security   

by Johannes Kanig

Taking on a Challenge in SPARK

Last week, the programmer Hillel posted a challenge (the link points to a partial postmortem of the provided solutions) on Twitter for someone to prove a correct implementation of three small programming problems: Leftpad, Unique, and Fulcrum.

#Formal Verification    #Formal Methods    #SPARK   

by Rob Tice

SPARKZumo Part 2: Integrating the Arduino Build Environment Into GPS

This is part #2 of the SPARKZumo series of blog posts. This post covers the build system that was used to build the SPARKZumo project and how to automate the process in GPS.

#GPS    #Python    #Libadalang    #Arduino    #CCG   

by Fabien Chouteau, Yannick Moy, Vasiliy Fofanov, Nicolas Setton

A Modern Syntax for Ada

One of the most criticized aspect of the Ada language throughout the years has been its outdated syntax. Fortunately, AdaCore decided to tackle this issue by implementing a new, modern, syntax for Ada.

#Ada    #GPS    #Language   

by Rob Tice

SPARKZumo Part 1: Ada and SPARK on Any Platform

So you want to use SPARK for your next microcontroller project? Great choice! All you need is an Ada 2012 ready compiler and the SPARK tools. But what happens when an Ada 2012 compiler isn’t available for your architecture?

#CCG    #SPARK    #Arduino    #RISC V    #embedded   

by Yannick Moy

Two Days Dedicated to Sound Static Analysis for Security

​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    #Frama-C    #Security    #Formal Methods    #Static Analysis   

by Yannick Moy

Tokeneer Fully Verified with SPARK 2014

Tokeneer is a software for controlling physical access to a secure enclave by means of a fingerprint sensor. This software was created by Altran (Praxis at the time) in 2003 using the previous generation of SPARK language and tools, as part of a project commissioned by the NSA to investigate the rigorous development of critical software using formal methods. The project artefacts, including the source code, were released as open source in 2008. Tokeneer was widely recognized as a milestone in industrial formal verification. We recently transitioned this software to SPARK 2014, and it allowed us to go beyond what was possible with the previous SPARK technology. We have also shown how security vulnerabilities introduced in the code can be detected by formal verification.

#SPARK    #Formal Methods   

by Felix Krause

The Road to a Thick OpenGL Binding for Ada: Part 2

This blog post is part two of a tutorial based on the OpenGLAda project and will cover implementation details such as a type system for interfacing with C, error handling, memory management, and loading functions.

#OpenGL    #Binding   

by Felix Krause

The Road to a Thick OpenGL Binding for Ada: Part 1

This blog post is part one of a tutorial based on the OpenGLAda project and will cover some the background of the OpenGL API and the basic steps involved in importing platform-dependent C functions.

#OpenGL    #Binding   

by Pierre-Marie de Rodat, Yannick Moy, Fabien Chouteau, Raphaël Amiard

AdaCore at FOSDEM 2018

Every year, free and open source enthusiasts gather at Brussels (Belgium) for two days of FLOSS-related conferences. FOSDEM organizers setup several “developer rooms”, which are venues that host talks on specific topics. This year, the event will happen on the 3rd and 4th of February (Saturday and Sunday) and there is a room dedicated to the Ada programming language.

by Lionel Matias

Leveraging Ada Run-Time Checks with Fuzz Testing in AFL

Fuzzing is a very popular bug finding method. The concept, very simple, is to continuously inject random (garbage) data as input of a software component, and wait for it to crash. If, like me, you find writing robustness test tedious and not very efficient in finding bugs, you might want to try fuzzing your Ada code. Here's a recipe to fuzz-test your Ada code, using American Fuzzy Lop and all the runtime checks your favorite Ada compiler can provide. Let's see (quickly) how AFL works, then jump right into fuzzing 3 open-source Ada libraries: ZipAda, AdaYaml, and GNATCOLL.JSON.

#Testing    #Ada    #VerificationTools   

by Manuel Iglesias Abbatermarco

Make with Ada 2017- Ada Based IoT Framework

Summary The Ada IoT Stack consists of an lwIp (“lightweight IP”) stack implementation written in Ada, with an associated high-level protocol to support embedded device connectivity nodes for today’s IoT world. The project was developed for the Make With Ada 2017 competition based on existing libraries and ported to embedded STM32 devices.

#embedded    #Ada    #IoT   

by Jamie Ayre

Welcoming New Members to the GNAT Pro Family

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.

#GNAT Pro    #Ada   

by Fabien Chouteau

There's a mini-RTOS in my language

The first thing that struck me when I started to learn about the Ada programing language was the tasking support. In Ada, creating tasks, synchronizing them, sharing access to resources, are part of the language

#Ada    #Ravenscar    #embedded    #STM32   

by J. German Rivera

Make with Ada 2017- A "Swiss Army Knife" Watch

Summary  The Hexiwear is an IoT wearable development board that has two NXP Kinetis microcontrollers. One is a K64F (Cortex-M4 core) for running the main embedded application software. The other one is a KW40 (Cortex M0+ core) for running a wireless connectivity stack (e.g., Bluetooth BLE or Thread). The Hexiwear board also has a rich set of peripherals, including OLED display, accelerometer, magnetometer, gryroscope, pressure sensor, temperature sensor and heart-rate sensor. This blog article describes the development of a "Swiss Army Knife" watch on the Hexiwear platform. It is a bare-metal embedded application developed 100% in Ada 2012, from the lowest level device drivers all the way up to the application-specific code, for the Hexiwear's K64F microcontroller. I developed Ada drivers for Hexiwear-specific peripherals from scratch, as they were not supported by AdaCore's Ada drivers library. Also, since I wanted to use the GNAT GPL 2017 Ada compiler but the GNAT GPL distribution did not include a port of the Ada Runtime for the Hexiwear board, I also had to port the GNAT GPL 2017 Ada runtime to the Hexiwear. All this application-independent code can be leveraged by anyone interested in developing Ada applications for the Hexiwear wearable device.

by Jonas Attertun

Make with Ada 2017: Brushless DC Motor Controller

This project involves the design of a software platform that provides a good basis when developing motor controllers for brushless DC motors (BLDC/PMSM). It consist of a basic but clean and readable implementation of a sensored field oriented control algorithm. Included is a logging feature that will simplify development and allows users to visualize what is happening. The project shows that Ada successfully can be used for a bare-metal project that requires fast execution.

#Makers    #MakewithAda    #STM32    #embedded   

by Pierre-Marie de Rodat

Highlighting Ada with Libadalang

While we are working very hard on semantic analysis in Libadalang, it is already possible to leverage its lexical and syntactic analyzers. A useful example for this is a syntax highlighter.

#Libadalang    #Ada   

by Rob Tice

The Adaroombot Project

The Adaroombot project consists of an iRobot CreateⓇ 2 and Ada running on a Raspberry Pi with a Linux OS. This is a great Intro-to-Ada project as it focuses on a control algorithm and a simple serial communications protocol. The iRobot CreateⓇ 2 platform was originally design for STEM education and has great documentation and support - making it very easy to create a control application using Ada. This blog looks at the creation of the project and some cool features of Ada that were learned along the way.

#Raspberry Pi    #ARM    #Linux    #Ada    #Roomba   

by Pierre-Marie de Rodat, Nicolas Setton

GNAT GPL 2017 is out!

For those users of the GNAT GPL edition, we are pleased to announce the availability of the 2017 release of GNAT GPL and SPARK GPL.

#GNAT GPL   

by Yannick Moy

Frama-C & SPARK Day Slides and Highlights

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.

#SPARK   

by Yannick Moy, Nicolas Roche

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 Emmanuel Briot

User-friendly strings API

User friendly strings API In a previous post, we described the design of a new strings package, with improved performance compared to the standard Ada unbounded strings implementation. That post focused on various programming techniques used to make that package as fast as possible.

#Ada    #gnatcoll   

by Fabien Chouteau, Arnaud Charlet, Yannick Moy

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 Raphaël Amiard, Yannick Moy, Pierre-Marie de Rodat

Going After the Low Hanging Bug

At AdaCore, we have a strong expertise in deep static analysis tools (CodePeer and SPARK), and we have been relying on the compiler GNAT and our coding standard checker GNATcheck to deal with more syntactic or weakly-semantic checks. The recent Libadalang technology, developed at AdaCore, provided us with an ideal basis to develop specialized light-weight static analyzers. As an experiment, we implemented two simple checkers using the Python binding of Libadalang. The results on our own codebase were eye-opening: we found a dozen bugs in the codebases of the tools we develop at AdaCore (including the compiler and static analyzers).

#Static Analysis   

by Yannick Moy

New Year's Resolution for 2017: Use SPARK, Say Goodbye to Bugs

​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.

#VerificationTools    #Formal Methods    #SPARK   

by AdaCore Admin

Make With Ada Winners Announced!

Judging for the first annual Make with Ada competition has come to an end and we can now reveal the results.

by Piotr Trojanek

Verifying Tasking in Extended, Relaxed Style

Tasking was one of the big features introduced in the previous release of SPARK 2014. However, GNATprove only supported tasking-related constructs allowed by the Ravenscar profile. Now it also supports the more relaxed GNAT Extended Ravenscar profile.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

Verified, Trustworthy Code with SPARK and Frama-C

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.

#SPARK    #Formal Methods   

by Quentin Ochem

Unity & Ada

Using Ada technologies to develop video games doesn’t sound like an an obvious choice - although it seems like there could be an argument to be made. The reverse, however, opens some more straightforward perspectives.

#GitHub    #Ada    #GNAT    

by Emmanuel Briot

Bookmarks in the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS)

As we improve existing views in GPS, we discover new ways to use them. This post shows some of the improvements done recently in the Bookmarks view, and how you can now use it as a TODO list.

#GPS   

by AdaCore Admin

Introducing the Make With Ada competition!

If you’ve been looking for a way to start your next embedded project in Ada or SPARK. Then, look no further than the Make with Ada competition!

#MakewithAda    #embedded    #SPARK     #Ada   

by Yannick Moy

Research Corner - Proving Security of Binary Programs with SPARK

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.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK    #Security   

by Pierre-Marie de Rodat

C library bindings: GCC plugins to the rescue

I recently started working on an Ada binding for the excellent libuv C library. This library provides a convenient API to perform asynchronous I/O under an event loop, which is a popular way to develop server stacks. A central part of this API is its enumeration type for error codes: most functions use it. Hence, one of the first things I had to do was to bind the enumeration type for error codes. Believe it or not: this is harder than it first seems!

#Code generation    #Ada   

by Fabien Chouteau

Make with Ada: ARM Cortex-M CNC controller

I started this project more than a year ago. It was supposed to be the first Make with Ada project but it became the most challenging from both, the hardware and software side.

#Makers    #Ada    #STM32    #ARM    #Embedded Development   

by Jérôme Lambourg

Efficient use of Simics for testing

As seen in the previous blog article, AdaCore relies heavily on virtualisation to perform the testing of its GNAT Pro products for VxWorks.

#Simics    #WindRiver    #GNAT Pro   

by AdaCore Admin

VectorCAST/Ada: Ada 2012 Language Support

We are pleased to announce that on April 27th our partner, Vector, will host a webinar to showcase their latest VectorCAST/Ada release!

by Yannick Moy

Did SPARK 2014 Rethink Formal Methods?

David Parnas is a well-known researcher in formal methods, who famously contributed to the analysis of the shut-down software for the Darlington nuclear power plant and designed the specification method known as Parnas tables and the development method called Software Cost Reduction. In 2010, the magazine CACM asked him to identify what was preventing more widespread adoption of formal methods in industry, and in this article on Really Rethinking Formal Methods he listed 17 areas that needed rethinking. The same year, we started a project to recreate SPARK with new ideas and new technology, which lead to SPARK 2014 as it is today. Parnas's article influenced some critical design decisions. Six years later, it's interesting to see how the choices we made in SPARK 2014 address (or not) Parnas's concerns.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by AdaCore Admin

Provably safe programming at Embedded World

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.

#ARM    #emb2016    #embedded    #Embedded World   

by AdaCore Admin

CubeSat continues to orbit the Earth thanks to Ada & SPARK!

Dr Carl Brandon of Vermont Technical College and his team of students used SPARK and Ada to successfully launch a satellite into space in 2013 and it has continued to orbit the Earth ever since! At our AdaCore Tech Days in Boston last year Dr Brandon explained further.

#Ada    #SPARK     #Space    #TechDay   

by Yannick Moy

Formal Verification of Legacy Code

Just a few weeks ago, one of our partners reported a strange behavior of the well-known function Ada.Text_IO.Get_Line, which reads a line of text from an input file. When the last line of the file was of a specific length like 499 or 500 or 1000, and not terminated with a newline character, then Get_Line raised an exception End_Error instead of returning the expected string. That was puzzling for a central piece of code known to have worked for the past 10 years! But fair enough, there was indeed a bug in the interaction between subprograms in this code, in boundary cases having to do with the size of an intermediate buffer. My colleague Ed Schonberg who fixed the code of Get_Line had nonetheless the intuition that this particular event, finding such a bug in an otherwise trusted legacy piece of code, deserved a more in depth investigation to ensure no other bugs were hiding. So he challenged the SPARK team at AdaCore in checking the correctness of the patched version. He did well, as in the process we uncovered 3 more bugs.

#SPARK    #Legacy    #Formal Methods   

by AdaCore Admin

Embedded Product Line Updates

Embedded products are not stand alone, this allows them to have safety, mission critical and real-time requirements that they wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise. The embedded product line provides analyzable, verifiable, and certifiable software for both static and dynamic analysis tools.

#AdaCoreTechDay    #GNAT     #Embedded Development    #embedded   

by AdaCore Admin

Formal Verification Made Easy!

We are pleased to announce our latest release of SPARK Pro! A product that has been jointly developed alongside our partner Altran and following the global AdaCore Tech Days, you can now see the SPARK 2014 talk, Formal Verification Made Easy by AdaCore’s Hristian Kirtchev, on YouTube.

#SPARK Pro    #SPARK2014     #SPARKPro16   

by AdaCore Admin

ERTS and Embedded World conferences 2016

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!

#ERTS2016    #Embedded World    #emb2016    #Embedded Development    #Safety Critical Development   

by Yannick Moy, Jamie Ayre, Emma Adby

Ada Lovelace Bicentennial

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.

#Lovelace   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Support for Ravenscar

As presented in a recent post by Pavlos, the upcoming release of SPARK Pro will support concurrency features of Ada, with the restrictions defined in the Ravenscar profile of Ada. This profile restricts concurrency so that concurrent programs are deterministic and schedulable. SPARK analysis makes it possible to prove that shared data is protected against data races, that deadlocks cannot occur and that no other run-time errors related to concurrency can be encountered when running the program. In this post, I revisit the example given by Pavlos to show SPARK features and GNATprove analysis in action.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Emmanuel Briot

Calling inherited subprograms in Ada

This short post describes an idiom that can be used to help maintain complex hierarchies of tagged types, when methods need to call the parent types methods.

#Ada   

by Florian Schanda

SPARK 2016 Supports Ravenscar!

The new big feature of the SPARK 2016 release is the support of the Ravenscar profile. Users can now use protected objects and tasks to write concurrent code. On uniprocessor computers the toolset can ensure that no deadlocks or data races will occur and that no tasks will terminate. Read this blog post to learn more and see the new feature in practice.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Emma Adby

Modernizing Adacore's Open-Source Involvement

Through the adoption of GitHub we have taken our first step on the way to having a more collaborative and dynamic interaction with, both our users and open source technologies.

#GitHub    #OSS    #Ada   

by Florian Schanda

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Variables That Are Constant

The SPARK tools now support yet another feature that allows users to better specify the intended behavior of their programs. This new feature enables users to declare that specific variables can only be updated during the elaboration of their enclosing package. Read on if you want to know more...

#Formal Verification    #Language    #SPARK   

by Emmanuel Briot

Traits-Based Containers

This post describes the design of a new containers library. It highlights some of the limitations of the standard Ada containers, and proposes a new approach using generic packages as formal parameters to make these new containers highly configurable at compile time.

#Ada    #Containers    #Generics   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Type Predicates

Preconditions and postconditions define a very strong mechanism for specifying invariant properties over the program's control. What about similar properties for the program's data? It turns out Ada 2012 defined such a construct, type predicates, which was not supported in SPARK until now. And now it is.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by AdaCore Admin

Project P Open Workshop

Project-P Open Workshop

#QGen    #ProjectP    #Workshop    #---    #Code generation   

by Karen Mason

The Year for #AdaLove

Despite her famously sharp analytical mind, it’s unlikely Ada Lovelace could have predicted the durability of her legacy as the world’s first computer programmer and pioneer for women in computing.

#Ada    #AdaLove   

by Martyn Pike

The latest Mixed Programming with Ada lectures at the AdaCore University

I recently joined AdaCore as a Technical Account Manager with an initial focus on the UK and Scandinavian regions, but for the last 12 months I've been busy working on the AdaCore University. The most recent addition to which is a course on Mixed Language Programming with Ada, and it includes lectures on the integration of Ada with C, C++ and Java. The course covers some advanced topics like mixed language object orientation, techniques for using Ada strong typing to combat known issue with C pointers and the pitfalls that are encountered when mixing native Ada code with Java at runtime. This course clearly demonstrates that Ada has strong support for integration with C, C++ and Java and it proves there are no technical barriers to its adoption in modern mixed language software systems.

#Mixed Language    #AdaCore University    #Java    #C++    #C    

by Yannick Moy

A Building Code for Building Code

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.

#Ada    #SPARK    #Static Analysis    #Security   

by Jamie Ayre

20 years on...

20 Years of AdaCore: Company as Committed as Ever on Safety-Critical Software Solutions

#20th Anniversary    #AdaLove   

by Olivier Ramonat

AdaCore Releases GNAT Pro 7.3, QGen 1.0 and GNATdashboard 1.0

February saw the annual customer release of a number of important products. This is no mean task when you consider the fact that GNAT Pro is available on over 50 platforms and supports over 150 runtime profiles (ranging from Full Ada Support to the very restricted Zero Footprint Profile suitable for safety-critical development). All in all, from the branching of the preview version to the customer release it takes us nearly 4 months to package everything up! Quality is assured through the internally developed AdaCore Factory.

#GNAT Pro    #SPARK Pro    #GPS    #GNATbench    #GNATdashboard    #Ada    #AdaCore Factory    #CodePeer    #QGen   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Functional Update

While attribute Old allows expressing inside postconditions the value of objects at subprogram entry, this is in general not enough to conveniently express how record and array objects are modified by a procedure. A special attribute Update is defined in SPARK to make it easy to express such properties.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Object Oriented Programming

Object Oriented Programming is known for making it particularly difficult to analyze programs, because the subprograms called are not always known statically. The standard for civil avionics certification has recognized this specific problem, and defines a specific verification objective called Local Type Consistency that should be met with one of three strategies. SPARK allows using one of these strategies, by defining the behavior of an overridden subprogram using a special class-wide contract and checking that the behavior of the overriding subprogram is a suitable substitution, following the Liskov Substitution Principle.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Johannes Kanig

SPARK 15: Errors, Warnings and Checks

The messages issued by the SPARK toolset will change a bit in the next version of both SPARK Pro and SPARK GPL. This post explains the change and the motivation behind it.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Claire Dross

External Axiomatizations: a Trip Into SPARK’s Internals

There are cases expressing all the specification of a package in SPARK is either impossible (for example if you need to link them to elements of the mathematical world, like trigonometry functions), cumbersome (especially if they require concepts that cannot easily be described using contracts, like transitivity, counting, summation...), or simply inefficient, for big and complex data structures like containers for example. In these cases, a user can provide directly a manually written Why3 translation for an Ada package using a feature named external axiomatizations. Coming up with this manual translation requires both a knowledge of the WhyML language and a minimal understanding of GNATprove's mechanisms and is therefore reserved to advanced users.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Claire Dross

Manual Proof with Ghost Code in SPARK 2014

Guiding automatic solvers by adding intermediate assertions is a commonly used technique. We can go further in this direction, by adding complete pieces of code doing nothing, generally called ghost code, to guide the automated reasoning. This is an advanced feature, for people willing to manually guide proofs. Still, it is all in SPARK 2014 and thus does not require the user to learn a new language. We explain here how we can achieve inductive proofs on a permutation function.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

Short Video Demo of SPARK 2014

New to SPARK? Want to "see" what's new in SPARK 2014? It's all in this 5 mn video demo!

#Formal Verification    #Language    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

Studies of Contracts in Practice

Two recent research papers focus on how program contracts are used in practice in open source projects, in three languages that support contracts (Eiffel obviously, Java with JML contracts and C# with Code Contracts). I'm reporting what I found interesting (and less so) in these two studies.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #Contracts   

by Florian Schanda

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Data Dependencies

Programs often use a few global variables. Global variables make passing common information between different parts of a program easier. By reading the specification of a subprogram we are able to see all of the parameters that the subprogram uses and, in Ada, we also get to know whether they are read, written or both. However, no information regarding the use of global variables is revealed by reading the specifications. In order to monitor and enforce which global variables a subprogram is allowed to use, SPARK 2014 has introduced the Global aspect, which I describe in this post.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Florian Schanda

Information Flo(w): Array Initialization in Loops

SPARK only supported array initialization using aggregates, as array initialization in loops raised a false alarm in flow analysis. Read on to learn how the situation has been improved in SPARK 2014.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

GNATprove Tips and Tricks: How to Write Loop Invariants

Having already presented in previous posts why loop invariants are necessary for formal verification of programs with loops, and what loop invariants are necessary for various loops, we detail here a methodology for how users can come up with the right loop invariants for their loops. This methodology in four steps allows users to progressively add the necessary information in their loop invariants, with the tool GNATprove providing the required feedback at each step on whether the information provided is sufficient or not.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Claire Dross

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Verifying Properties over Formal Containers

We saw in a previous post how we could express complex properties over formal containers using quantified expressions. In this post, I present how these properties can be verified by the proof tool called GNATprove.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

Muen Separation Kernel Written in SPARK

The University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil in Switzerland has released last week an open-source separation kernel written in SPARK, which has been proved free from run-time errors. This project is part of the secure multilevel workstation project by Secunet, a German security company, which is using SPARK and Isabelle to create the next generation of secure workstations providing different levels of security to government employees and military personnel. I present why I think this project is worth following closely.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Claire Dross

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Expressing Properties over Formal Containers

We saw in a previous post how formal containers can be used in SPARK code. In this post, I describe how to express properties over the content of these containers, using quantified expressions.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

Rail, Space, Security: Three Case Studies for SPARK 2014

We will present three case studies using SPARK 2014 at the upcoming Embedded Real Time Software and Systems conference in Toulouse in February 2014, in three different domains: rail, space and security. The lessons learned in those three case studies are particularly interesting. Here is the companion paper that we wrote.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Claire Dross

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Formal Containers

SPARK 2014 excludes data structures based on pointers. Instead, one can use the library of formal containers. They are variant of the Ada 2012 bounded containers, specifically designed and annotated to facilitate the proof of programs using them.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

GNATprove Tips and Tricks: Referring to Input in Contracts

In a previous post about pre-call values, I described how the Ada language rules implemented in the compiler prevent surprises when referring to input values in the postcondition, using the Old attribute. Unfortunately, these rules also make it difficult to express some complex postconditions that may be useful when doing formal verification. In this post, I describe how contract cases allow the expression of these complex contracts, while still detecting potential problems with uses of the Old attribute.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Global State

Global variables are a common source of programming errors: they may fail to be initialized properly, they can be modified in unexpected ways, sequences of modifications may be illegal, etc. SPARK 2014 provides a way to define abstractly the global state of a unit, so that it can be referred to in subprogram specifications. The associated toolset checks correct access to global variables in the implementation.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Mixing SPARK and Ada Code

The first step before any formal verification work with SPARK is to delimitate the part of the code that will be subject to formal verification within the overall Ada application. This post presents the solution we've come up with for SPARK 2014.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Loop Variants

Loop variants are the little-known cousins of the loop invariants, used for proving termination of subprograms. Although they may not look very useful at first, they can prove effective as I show with a simple binary search example. And we came up with both an elegant syntax and a slick refinement for loop variants in SPARK 2014, compared to similar constructs in other languages.

#Language    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Loop Invariants

Formal verification tools like GNATprove rely on two main inputs from programmers: subprogram contracts (preconditions and postconditions) and loop invariants. While the first ones are easy to understand (based on the "contract" analogy, in which a subprogram and its caller have mutual obligations), the second ones are not so simple to grasp. This post presents loop invariants and the choices we made in SPARK 2014.

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by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Pre-call and Pre-loop Values

Subprogram contracts are commonly presented as special assertions: the precondition is an assertion checked at subprogram entry, while the postcondition is an assertion checked at subprogram exit. A subtlety not covered by this simplified presentation is that postconditions are really two-state assertions: they assert properties over values at subprogram exit and values at subprogram entry. A special attribute Old is defined in Ada 2012 to support these special assertions. A special attribute Loop_Entry is defined in SPARK 2014 to support similar special assertions for loops.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

MISRA-C 2012 vs SPARK 2014, the Subset Matching Game

The MISRA C subset of C defines around 150 rules that restrict C programs for critical software development. Of these, 27 rules are classified as undecidable, which means that few MISRA C checkers (if any) will help checking those hardest rules. Here is how SPARK 2014 can help checking similar rules in Ada programs.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK    #MISRA-C   

by Florian Schanda

SPARK 2014 Flow Analysis

We have nearly finished implementing a central component of the SPARK 2014 analysis tools: the flow analysis engine; so this is a good time to introduce some of the analysis it will carry out.

#Language    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Specification Functions

Specifying a program's behavior is seldom expressible in a satisfiable way without the capability of abstraction provided by function calls. Yet, specification functions must obey specific constraints like absence of side-effects and termination, that have led to different solutions in various specification languages. Here is what we did in SPARK 2014.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Johannes Kanig

SPARK 2014 goes to Space!

David Lesens from Astrium was a member of the Hi-Lite project ("was" because the project is finished now, see the previous post), and has tried GNATprove - the formal verification tool for SPARK 2014 - on space vehicle software as an industrial case study of the project. And it turns out GNATprove performed pretty well!

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Contract Cases

Besides the usual expression of a subprogram contract as a pair of a precondition and a postcondition, SPARK 2014 provides a way to express such a contract by cases. A little history helps understanding how we came up with this new feature.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

Project Hi-Lite Wrap-up

After three years of hard work, we have reached last week the end of project Hi-Lite, whose goal was to simplify the use of formal methods. We're proud to publicize the results obtained, in particular the new version of SPARK and the associated tool GNATprove. Here's a summary of the wrap-up meeting.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK