58 entries tagged with #web
by Paul Butcher
Automated Assurance through Differential Fuzzing
This blog describes the concept and benefits of differential fuzz testing. In addition, the post describes setting up, executing and analyzing the results of a differential fuzzing campaign for the Libkeccak and XKCP cryptographic libraries.by Fabien Chouteau

Our Contribution to the Ada Logo Discussion
From time to time we see, here and there, discussions in the Ada community about the design and adoption of a common logo to represent the language. Today we want to bring our contribution to this discussion by offering a logo to the Ada community.by Fabien Chouteau
Tis the Season to be Giving falalalala lalalala
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.by Gustavo A. Hoffmann
Announcing Updates to learn.adacore.com
by Fabien Chouteau
AdaCore at FOSDEM 2022
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.
by Paul Butcher

Fuzz Testing in International Aerospace Guidelines
Through the HICLASS UK research group, AdaCore has been developing security-focused software development tools that are aligned with the objectives stated within the avionics security standards. In addition, they have been developing further guidelines that describe how vulnerability identification and security assurance activities can be described within a Plan for Security Aspects of Certification.by Fabien Chouteau
An Embedded USB Device stack in Ada
A couple years ago I started to tackle what was probably my most daunting project at the time, an embedded USB Device stack written 100% in Ada.by Juliana Silva

Make with Ada 2020: The autonomous firetruck
The AFT (Autonomous FireTruck) is a prototype of an autonomous firetruck that can put out fire without risking people's lives. This project won a finalist prize in the Make with Ada 2019/20 competition.by Juliana Silva

Make with Ada 2020: Ada Robot Car With Neural Network
Guillermo Perez's project won a finalist prize in the Make with Ada 2019/20 competition. This project was originally posted on Hackster.io here. For those interested in participating in the 2020/21 competition, registration is now open and project submissions will be accepted until Jan 31st 2021, register here.by Fabien Chouteau
First beta release of Alire, the package manager for Ada/SPARK
A few years ago we realized that having a package manager for the Ada/SPARK community would be a game changer. Since then, AdaCore has been sponsoring and contributing to the Alire project created by Alejandro Mosteo from the Centro Universitario de la Defensa de Zaragoza. With this blog post I want to introduce Alire and explain why this project is important for the `Ada`/`SPARK` community.by Fabien Chouteau , Emma Adby
AdaCore Code of Conduct
Starting today, AdaCore has put in place a Code of Conduct (CoC) to ensure a positive environment for everyone willing and wanting to interact with us. With the development of this blog, our twitter accounts, and our GitHub corporate account, there is more and more communication between AdaCore and a number of communities. In this Code of Conduct we want to explain how we are going to moderate the AdaCore-maintained community spaces with the goal of maintaining a welcoming, friendly environment.
by Emma Adby

Make with Ada 2020: The SmartBase - IoT Adjustable Bed
John Singleton's The SmartBase makes your existing adjustable bed safer and easier to use by adding voice control and safe (and fun!) LED underbed lighting! Additionally, this project won first place prize in the 2019/20 Make with Ada competition.by Pat Rogers
From Ada to Platinum SPARK: A Case Study for Reusable Bounded Stacks
This blog entry describes the transformation of an Ada stack ADT into a completely proven SPARK implementation that relies on static verification instead of run-time enforcement of the abstraction’s semantics. We will prove that there are no reads of unassigned variables, no array indexing errors, no range errors, no numeric overflow errors, no attempts to push onto a full stack, no attempts to pop from an empty stack, that subprogram bodies implement their functional requirements, and so on. As a result, we get a maximally robust implementation of a reusable stack abstraction providing all the facilities required for production use.by Roderick Chapman
Proving properties of constant-time crypto code in SPARKNaCl
Over the last few months, I developed a SPARK version of the TweetNaCl cryptographic library. This was made public on GitHub in February 2020, under the 2-clause BSD licence. This blog entry goes into a bit more technical detail on one particular aspect of the project: the challenge of re-writing and verifying "constant time" algorithms using SPARK.by Ghjuvan Lacambre

Time travel debugging in GNAT Studio with GDB and RR
Learn how to use GDB and RR's advanced time traveling features in GNAT Studio.by Maxim Reznik
Android application with Ada and WebAssembly
Having previously shown how to create a Web application in Ada, it's not so difficult to create an Android application in Ada. Perhaps the simplest way is to install Android Studio. Then just create a new project and choose "Empty Activity". Open the layout, delete TextView and put WebView instead.
by Pat Rogers

Making an RC Car with Ada and SPARK
As a demonstration for the use of Ada and SPARK in very small embedded targets, I created a remote-controlled (RC) car using Lego NXT Mindstorms motors and sensors but without using the Lego computer or Lego software. I used an ARM Cortex System-on-Chip board for the computer, and all the code -- the control program, the device drivers, everything -- is written in Ada. Over time, I’ve upgraded some of the code to be in SPARK. This blog post describes the hardware, the software, the SPARK upgrades, and the repositories that are used and created for this purpose.
by Vadim Godunko
Using GNAT-LLVM to target Ada to WebAssembly
The GNAT-LLVM project provides an opportunity to port Ada to new platforms, one of which is WebAssembly. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the porting of Ada and the development of bindings to use Web API provided by the browser directly from Ada applications.
by Quentin Ochem
Witnessing the Emergence of a New Ada Era
For nearly four decades the Ada language (in all versions of the standard) has been helping developers meet the most stringent reliability, safety and security requirements in the embedded market. As such, Ada has become an entrenched player in its historic A&D niche, where its technical advantages are recognized and well understood. Ada has also seen usage in other domains (such as medical and transportation) but its penetration has progressed at a somewhat slower pace. In these other markets Ada stands in particular contrast with the C language, which, although suffering from extremely well known and documented flaws, remains a strong and seldom questioned default choice. Or at least, when it’s not the choice, C is still the starting point (a gateway drug?) for alternatives such as C++ or Java, which in the end still lack the software engineering benefits that Ada embodies..
by Arnaud Charlet
Combining GNAT with LLVM
Presenting the GNAT LLVM projectAt AdaCore labs, we have been working for some time now on combining the GNAT Ada front-end with a different code generator than GCC.
by Maxim Reznik , Yannick Moy
First Ada Virtual Conference organized by and for the Ada community
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.by Joffrey Huguet , Johannes Kanig
Proving a simple program doing I/O ... with SPARK
The functionality of many security-critical programs is directly related to Input/Output (I/O). This includes command-line utilities such as gzip, which might process untrusted data downloaded from the internet, but also any servers that are directly connected to the internet, such as webservers, DNS servers and so on. In this blog post we show an approach that deals with error handling and reasoning about content, and demonstrate the approach using the cat command line utility.by Yannick Moy , Nicolas Setton , Ben Brosgol
A Readable Introduction to Both MISRA C and SPARK Ada
MISRA C is the most widely known coding standard restricting the use of the C programming language for critical software. For good reasons. For one, its focus is entirely on avoiding error-prone programming features of the C programming language rather than on enforcing a particular programming style. In addition, a large majority of rules it defines are checkable automatically (116 rules out of the total 159 guidelines), and many tools are available to enforce those. As a coding standard, MISRA C even goes out of its way to define a consistent sub-language of C, with its own typing rules (called the "essential type model" in MISRA C) to make up for the lack of strong typing in C.
by Yannick Moy , Nicolas Roche , Pierre-Marie de Rodat , Fabien Chouteau
AdaCore at FOSDEM 2019
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.by Rob Tice
AdaFractal Part 2: Fixed Point and Floating Point Math Performance and Parallelization
In Part 1 of this blog post I discussed why I chose to implement this application using the Ada Web Server to serve the computed fractal to a web browser. In this part I will discuss a bit more about the backend of the application, the Ada part.
by Rob Tice
AdaFractal Part1: Ada with a Portable GUI
The is the first part of a multiple part post that covers the development of the AdaFractal project. The idea was to create fractals in Ada. Here we will cover how to use AWS to create a flexible and portable way to display the generated fractals without using bulky graphics libraries.by Yannick Moy
Amazon Relies on Formal Methods for the Security of AWS
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.by Fabien Chouteau , Emma Adby , Yannick Moy

Learn.adacore.com is here
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.by Yannick Moy
Security Agency Uses SPARK for Secure USB Key
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.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.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?
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.by Yannick Moy
Secure Software Architectures Based on Genode + SPARK
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.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.by Johannes Kanig

Bitcoin blockchain in Ada: Lady Ada meets Satoshi Nakamoto
Bitcoin is getting a lot of press recently, but let's be honest, that's mostly because a single bitcoin worth 800 USD in January 2017 was worth almost 20,000 USD in December 2017. However, bitcoin and its underlying blockchain are beautiful technologies that are worth a closer look. Let’s take that look with our Ada hat on!
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.by Pierre-Marie de Rodat , Raphaël Amiard
Cross-referencing Ada with Libadalang
Libadalang has come a long way since the last time we blogged about it. In the past 6 months, we have been working tirelessly on name resolution, a pretty complicated topic in Ada, and it is finally ready enough that we feel ready to blog about it, and encourage people to try it out.
by Yannick Moy
Prove in the Cloud
We have put together a byte (8 bits) of examples of SPARK code on a server in the cloud. The benefit with this webpage is that anyone can now experiment live with SPARK without installing first the toolset. Something particularly interesting for academics is that all the code for this widget is open source. So you can setup your own proof server for hands-on sessions, with your own exercises, in a matter of minutes.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.by Jorge Real

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!
by Emma Adby
AdaCore attends FOSDEM
Earlier this month AdaCore attended FOSDEM in Brussels, an event focused on the use of free and open source software. Two members of our technical team presented.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).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.by Emma Adby
Building High-Assurance Software without Breaking the Bank
AdaCore will be hosting a joint webcast next Monday 12th December 2pm ET/11am PT with SPARK experts Yannick Moy and Rod Chapman. Together, they will present the current status of the SPARK solution and explain how it can be successfully adopted in your current software development processes.
by Emma Adby
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 Pat Rogers

Driving a 3D Lunar Lander Model with ARM and Ada
One of the interesting aspects of developing software for a bare-board target is that displaying complex application-created information typically requires more than the target board can handle. Although some boards do have amazing graphics capabilities, in some cases you need to have the application on the target interact with applications on the host. This can be due to the existence of special applications that run only (or already) on the host, in particular.
by Yannick Moy
Research Corner - SPARK on Lunar IceCube Micro Satellite
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.by Emma Adby
Certification and Qualification
AdaCore provides several tools with certification and qualification capabilities, for the rail and avionics industry. Quentin Ochem’s presentation on “Certification and Qualification” at the 2015 AdaCore Tech Days in Boston, Massachusetts provided more information about these two standards, namely DO-178C and EN:50128:2011.
by Emma Adby

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 Emma Adby

AdaCore Tech Days 2015
by Yannick Moy
New Book About SPARK 2014
I am very pleased to announce that a book is now available for those who want to learn formal verification with SPARK 2014. This book was written by Prof. John McCormick from University of Northern Iowa and Prof. Peter Chapin from Vermont Technical College. We've been interacting a lot with them since they started in 2013, and the result of these interactions is quite satisfying!by Fabien Chouteau

Make with Ada: "The Eagle has landed"
July 20, 1969, 8:18 p.m. UTC, while a bunch of guys were about to turn blue on Earth, commander Neil A. Armstrong confirms the landing of his Lunar Module (LM), code name Eagle, on the moon. Will you be able to manually land Eagle on the Sea of Tranquillity?by Emma Adby
Verification on Ada code with Static and Dynamic Code Analysis - Webinar
One of the main challenges to get certification in Ada projects is the achievement of 100% code coverage but in most projects an amount of more than 95% structural coverage is hard to achieve. What can you do with the last 5% of code that can't be covered? DO-178C for example, provides a framework for the integration of various techniques in the development process to solve the problem. In this webinar you learn how static analysis and dynamic testing can help complete analysis for pieces of code that are not covered.
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.by Tristan Gingold , Yannick Moy

Tetris in SPARK on ARM Cortex M4
Tetris is a well-known game from the 80's, which has been ported in many versions to all game platforms since then. There are even versions of Tetris written in Ada. But there was no version of Tetris written in SPARK, so we've repaired that injustice. Also, there was no version of Tetris for the Atmel SAM4S ARM processor, another injustice we've repaired.
by Yannick Moy
