AdaCore Blog

22 entries tagged with #Security

by Nicolas Roche , Olivier Ramonat

Identifying and authorizing users at AdaCore

Back in the 90s when AdaCore was founded, the state of IT security was very different. A unique Unix login and password were enough to connect to a shared server and run business applications. Most of the protocols used were still unencrypted, and the most elaborate access controls were based on Unix groups and perimeter defense. As the company evolved, we gave users access to more and more services, some not hosted on-premise. More services meant distinct credentials. Security-savvy users, who did not accept reusing the same password everywhere, had the burden of maintaining all these distinct credentials. Most credentials were long-lived, and very often shared. Also as the notion of perimeter defense became more and more fuzzy with the introduction of PaaS, IaaS, .. the need for safer access and communication protocols increased significantly.

#DevOps    #Security   

by Yannick Moy

When Formal Verification with SPARK is the Strongest Link

Security is only as strong as its strongest link. That's important to keep in mind for software security, with its long chain of links, from design to development to deployment. Last year, members of NVIDIA's Offensive Security Research team (aka "red team") presented at DEF CON 29 their results on the evaluation of the security of a firmware written in SPARK and running on RISC-V. The ended up not finding vulnerabilities in the code, but in the RISC-V ISA instead. This year, the same team presented at DEF CON 30 a retrospective on the security evaluation of 17 high-impact projects since 2020. TL;DR: using SPARK makes a big difference for security, compared to using C/C++.

#Security    #SPARK    #Formal Verification   

by Yannick Moy

Enhancing the Security of a TCP Stack with SPARK

The developers of CycloneTCP library at Oryx Embedded partnered with AdaCore to replace the TCP part of the C codebase by SPARK code, and used the SPARK tools to prove both that the code is not vulnerable to the usual runtime errors (like buffer overflow) and that it correctly implements the TCP automaton specified in RFC 793. As part of this work, we found two subtle bugs related to memory management and concurrency. This work has been accepted for publication at the upcoming IEEE SecDev 2021 conference.

#SPARK    #Security    #Formal Verification   

by Yannick Moy

When the RISC-V ISA is the Weakest Link

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.

#Security    #SPARK    #RISC-V   

by Roderick Chapman

SPARKNaCl with GNAT and SPARK Community 2021: Port, Proof and Performance

This post continues our adventures with SPARKNaCl - our verified SPARK version of the TweetNaCl cryptographic library. This time, we'll be looking at yet more performance improvement via proof-driven "operator narrowing", porting the library to GNAT Community 2021, and the effect that has on proof and performance of the code.

#SPARK     #Cryptography    #Formal Verification    #Code generation    #RISC-V    #Security   

by Paul Butcher

Finding Vulnerabilities using Advanced Fuzz testing and AFLplusplus v3.0

Some of you may recall an AdaCore blog post written in 2017 by Thales engineer Lionel Matias titled "Leveraging Ada Run-Time Checks with Fuzz Testing in AFL". This insightful post took us on a journey of discovery as Lionel demonstrated how Ada programs, compiled using GNAT Pro and an adapted assembler pass can be subjected to advanced fuzz testing. In order to achieve this Lionel demonstrated how instrumentation of the generated assembly code around jump and label instructions, could be subjected to grey-box (path aware) fuzz testing (using the original AFL v2.52b as the fuzz engine). Lionel explained how applying the comprehensive spectrum of Ada runtime checks, in conjunction with Ada's strong typing and contract based programming, enhanced the capabilities of fuzz testing beyond the abilities of other languages. Ada's advanced runtime checking, for exceptions like overflows, and the scrutiny of Ada's design by contract assertions allow corner case bugs to be found whilst also utilising fuzz testing to verify functional correctness.

#Security   

by Boran Car

Bringing Ada To MultiZone

C is the dominant language of the embedded world, almost to the point of exclusivity. Due to its age, and its goal of being a “portable assembler”, it deliberately lacks type-safety, opening up exploit vectors. Proposed solutions are partitioning the application into smaller intercommunicating blocks, designed with the principle of least privilege in mind; and rewriting the application in a type-safe language. We believe that both approaches are complementary and want to show you how to combine separation and isolation provided by MultiZone together with iteratively rewriting parts in Ada. We will take the MultiZone SDK demo and rewrite one of the zones in Ada.

#Ada    #Embedded    #Embedded Development    #Security    #multizone    #Hex-Five   

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.

#MISRA-C    #SPARK    #Safety    #Security   

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​.

#Formal Verification    #Cloud    #Security   

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.

#SPARK    #Security    #Formal Methods   

by Yannick Moy , Roderick Chapman

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 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

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.

#SPARK    #Mobile    #Security   

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   

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