AdaCore Showcase Secure Avionics by Design at CYBERUK
13 Mayo 2024 - 4:08AM
Business Wire
AdaCore, a leader in high-assurance, safe, and secure software
toolchains, is set to stand out at CYBERUK by showcasing its unique
approach to Secure Avionics by Design (SAbD).
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AdaCore Showcase Secure Avionics by
Design at CYBERUK (Photo: AdaCore UK)
AdaCore's SAbD technology has emerged from phase 1 of the
collaborative and ongoing Edge Avionics programme. Edge Avionics
aims to research state-of-the-art systems security by building a
real-world demonstrator avionics defense platform (hardware and
software) that showcases cyber and battlefield resilience. The Edge
Avionics programme is funded by the Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO)
of the UK Royal Air Force (UK RAF). Edge Avionics is a consortium
led on behalf of the RCO by the Defence Science and Technology
Laboratory (Dstl, an executive agency of the UK Ministry of Defence
(MOD)) and delivered by GE Aerospace (the prime), Wind River, and
AdaCore.
The primary mission of Edge Avionics is to evaluate security
claims made by the Digital Security by Design (DSbD) initiative
within a large-scale defense application. DSbD is a programme
supported by the UK government to transform digital technology and
create a more resilient and secure foundation for a safer future.
DSbD involves a significant collaboration between academia,
industry, and government with an essential emphasis on evaluating
the security benefits of Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC
Instructions (CHERI). In partnership with The University of
Cambridge and Arm, the initial CHERI initiative has also received
large amounts of funding from the US government through SRI
International via the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA, the central research and development organization of the
Department of Defense (DOD)). CHERI promises to revolutionize the
design of CPU architectures by providing dedicated registers and
instructions for enforcing the safe usage of memory allocation,
reads, and writes. CHERI aims to provide a framework for building
and executing software applications that trap non-safe memory
instruction calls directly at the hardware level, thus eliminating
many memory-related vulnerabilities by making them
non-exploitable.
The Dstl technical lead for Edge Avionics emphasizes the context
and importance of secure by design:
“The UK government support for the world leading CHERI
technology through the Innovate UK DSbD initiative is part of a
strategy to enable security and resilience using a ‘secure by
design’ approach. A CHERI compute solution provides one of the
foundation elements for a secure by design system and is being
explored through the Edge Avionics technical demonstrator. Secure
by design is now a requirement for Ministry of Defence
systems.”
AdaCore's commercially available SAbD solution provides a
complete Ada toolchain to build highly secure bare-metal
applications executing on Arm Morello, a CHERI ISA CPU, and an
evaluation board. AdaCore's GCC and LLVM bare-metal Ada runtimes
have been enhanced to support CHERI pure-capability memory
allocators as well as other novel features that bring new security
by design options to avionics development, as explained by Paul
Butcher, UK Programme Manager, and AdaCore's Edge Avionics Project
Manager:
"CYBERUK has been an excellent venue for AdaCore to showcase our
range of security solutions designed for the highest-assurance
security systems, and we're excited to present our latest
state-of-the-art contribution at CYBERUK 2024. We see
microprocessor CHERI Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) that
support capability registers, capability instructions, and
pure-capability mode as the ultimate CPU security toolkit upon
which the highest assurance software systems can be developed and
deployed. Our solution couples the memory-safe programming language
Ada with a security-enhanced GNAT Pro Ada runtime designed to fully
utilize the pure-capability memory-safety properties the Arm
Morello CHERI compatible CPU provides.”
We asked John Goodacre (Director of the Digital Security by
Design Challenge Fund) why CYBERUK is important to DSbD and what it
means to be co-exhibiting with partners like AdaCore:
"The Digital Security by Design (DSbD) initiative is
transitioning into an exciting phase as concrete examples of
industry grade CHERI enabled hardware and software emerge. CYBERUK
is a perfect venue for DSbD to showcase various efforts that enable
a more trustworthy and resilient digital environment. This year, we
are attending with multiple partners to demonstrate the results of
their efforts and commercial opportunities in delivering memory
safety and low cost, enhanced system protections. Through the Edge
Avionics programme, AdaCore is demonstrating the benefits of DSbD
technology within a defence environment, and DSbD thoroughly
supports their work and looks forward to welcoming them and their
demonstrator system on the DSbD stand, C2, at CYBERUK 2024."
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