NEW YORK and PARIS, August 24, 2010 – AdaCore, a leading supplier of Ada development tools and support services, today announced the launch of Ada Web Server (AWS) for Wind River’s VxWorks Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). When used in conjunction with the GNAT Pro development environment, AWS enables developers to embed an Ada-based web server within any application, accessible through web browsers. With AWS for VxWorks, users can connect through a direct TCP/IP link to board-level applications for a variety of purposes, such as system control, configuration, and/or maintenance. The two-way interface is both lightweight and flexible.

In the past, AWS has been available on native operating systems, including Windows and Linux. VxWorks is the first RTOS supported by AWS, providing developers with a target-independent solution for creating user interfaces for embedded applications. Ports to additional embedded RTOS platforms are currently under development.

“Embedded applications used to be fairly self-contained and autonomous. This picture is changing rapidly, and a growing number now have a connection to the Internet or at least to a company’s intranet,” said Cyrille Comar, Managing Director, AdaCore. “AWS for VxWorks provides GNAT Pro customers with a very simple and integrated way to implement a user interface to their embedded devices through regular web browsers, bringing the power of modern web technology to the traditional embedded world.”

“Wind River is pleased to see AWS support made available for the VxWorks platform,” said Chip Downing, senior director of aerospace and defense at Wind River. “AdaCore continues to add advanced capabilities for VxWorks that expand the use cases for both products.”

Key features of AWS:

• Web Parameters Module for retrieving forms or URL parameters and building an associative table for easy access
• Session Server that keeps client data from page to page
• SOAP support for developing web services and generating stubs/skeletons from a WSDL document
• Template parser, allowing the complete separation of web design from code
• HTTPS/SSL, for Secure Sockets based on the OpenSSL library
• Support for large servers and virtual hosting using dispatchers based on URI request methods or host names
• Server Push support
• Log Module to keep log file of all resources requested by servers
• Support for SOAP, SMTP, POP and LDAP protocols and the AJAX standard
• Client-side support using client API to retrieve any web page from a web page
• High-level services, including directory browser, status page for information, and web page service to build simple static page servers

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, the state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore’s flagship product is the GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base; see www.adacore.com/home/company/customers/ for further information.

Ada and GNAT Pro see a growing usage in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including commercial aircraft avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, railway systems and medical devices, and in security-sensitive domains such as financial services.

AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com

NEW YORK, PARIS, and BATH, England, August 16, 2010 – Crypto 2010 Conference

Altran Praxis and AdaCore today announced a new reference implementation of the Skein algorithm, written and verified using the GPL 2010 Edition of the SPARK language and toolset. Skein is a cryptographic hash function and an entrant in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) hash function competition to design what will become the new Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-3) standard. Such hash functions are used to compute short “digests” of long messages, and are one of the key building blocks of digital communication and cryptographic systems. Altran Praxis and AdaCore have open sourced the SPARKSkein reference implementation and made it available to the developer community via the Skein website. This is in time for the second SHA-3 candidate conference taking place at the Crypto 2010 conference, Santa Barbara, California, USA, from 23-24 August 2010.

The joint Altran Praxis and AdaCore project began as an informal experiment to demonstrate whether a hash algorithm like Skein could be realistically implemented in SPARK. The goals of the implementation were:

• Readability – to strike a reasonable balance of readability and performance.


• Portability – the team aimed for a single code-base that was portable and correct on all target machines of any word size and endian-ness, with no macros, ‘ifdefs’, or pre-processing of any kind.


• Performance – to ensure that the performance of the SPARK code would be close to or better than the existing C reference implementation.


• Formality – to prove at least type-safety (i.e., no exceptions) on the SPARKSkein code. The team wanted to use the experiment to refute the claim that ‘formal is slow’ in programming languages.

The project concluded with notable success, proving that an algorithm like Skein can be written in a ‘formal’ language like SPARK without sacrificing readability or performance. Furthermore, portability was achieved. A single set of sources yielded identical results on more than fifteen platforms, covering a wide range of microprocessors and operating systems. In addition, SPARK’s type-safe nature allowed the project team to maximize compiler optimization with confidence.

Professor Stefan Lucks, a member of the Skein design team, said, “Speaking for the Skein design team, we’re very impressed by this work. SPARKSkein isn’t just another implementation of Skein – essential properties of this implementation have been formally verified. It is stunning how the formal verification of the SPARK source code actually made us discover a flaw in our own reference C implementation. Personally, I also find the SPARK code to be more readable than the equivalent C.”

Rod Chapman, a Principal Engineer at Altran Praxis, led the SPARKSkein project. He said, “This is an incredibly exciting project for us to be involved in. By open sourcing the code and donating our work, we hope to make a valuable contribution to the scientific community, as well as to showcase the capability of SPARK and its verification tools.”

“ Eric Botcazou, GCC expert and consultant at AdaCore provided the optimization and performance analysis for the project. He added, “The results clearly demonstrate that the SPARKSkein code is easy to understand and read, while the performance is at a comparable speed to the C code. This is solid evidence that any ‘formal’ code developed in this way doesn’t have to be slow and impractical.”

About Altran Praxis
Altran Praxis is a specialist systems and software house, focused on the engineering of systems with demanding safety, security or innovation requirements. Altran Praxis leads the world in specific areas of advanced systems engineering and innovation such as: ultra low defect software engineering, Human Machine Interface (HMI), safety engineering for complex or novel systems and tools/methods (such as SPARK) for systems engineering. It offers clients a range of services including turnkey systems development, consultancy, training and R&D. Key market sectors are aerospace and defence, rail, nuclear, air traffic management, automotive, medical and security.

The company operates globally with active projects in the US, Asia and Europe. The headquarters of Altran Praxis are in Bath (UK) with offices in Sophia Antipolis, London, Paris, Loughborough and Bangalore. Altran Praxis is an expertise centre within, and wholly owned by, Altran which is a global leader in innovation engineering and employs 17,000 staff across the world. www.altran-praxis.com

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, the state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore’s flagship product is the GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base; see www.adacore.com/home/company/customers/ for further information.

Ada and GNAT Pro see a growing usage in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including commercial aircraft avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, railway systems and medical devices, and in security-sensitive domains such as financial services.

AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com

Press Contacts

Jamie Ayre
AdaCore
press@adacore.com

Jessie Glockner
Rainier Communications (for AdaCore)
adacore@rainierco.com
Tel: +1 508 475 0025 x140

Leena Chauhan
Altran Praxis
press@altran-praxis.com
Tel: +44 (0) 203 1170884

Gerry Grewal/Sara Collinge
Speed
altran-praxis@speedcommunications.com
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7842 3200

PARIS, BATH and NEW YORK, July 27th, 2010 – The company secunet Security Networks AG, one of Germany’s largest IT security providers, announced today that it has adopted the SPARK Pro development environment. SPARK Pro, a Freely Licensed Open Source Software (FLOSS) product created by AdaCore and Altran Praxis, will be used by secunet as a strategic technology to build highly robust security-critical applications.

The first secunet project to apply SPARK Pro will be the Multilevel Workstation, an interactive system for concurrently handling information of different security domains. To maintain confidentiality and integrity of all processed data, Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) are enforced on a single hardware platform.

SPARK Pro was chosen by secunet because it was the only mature and commercially supported environment suiting the requirements for developing security-critical applications for secunet’s multi-level products. Moreover, SPARK Pro’s formal verification techniques provide the foundation necessary for achieving stringent high-robustness certifications of secunet’s multi-level systems.

SPARK Pro was launched in 2009 by Altran Praxis, an international specialist in embedded and critical systems engineering, and AdaCore, the leading provider of commercial software solutions for the Ada language. SPARK Pro provides the foremost language, toolset and design discipline for engineering high-assurance software. It combines Altran Praxis’ renowned SPARK language and verification tools with the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) and GNATbench development environments by AdaCore.

SPARK Pro provides increased support for security assurance, including the ability to mix software of different security levels (such as classified and unclassified) within the same system. This MILS functionality meets an increasing trend in the security and defense industries to combine multiple secure and non-secure elements into a single partitioned system to deliver smaller, more integrated solutions.

“For the security-critical parts of our workstation we needed a formal verification technique that was as mature as manageable in a large-scale project,” said Alexander Senier, project manager of secunet’s Multilevel Workstation. “SPARK Pro was the only solution that met our requirements, combining trustworthy development tools with excellent support provided directly by the experts. As a strategically important technology SPARK Pro enables us to further enhance the security, certifiability and flexibility of our future high-security solutions.”

Founded in 1997, secunet is one of Germany’s leading providers of superior IT security. Working with its customers – enterprises, public authorities and international organizations – secunet develops and implements high-performance products and state-of-the-art IT security solutions. At secunet, more than 270 experts focus on issues such as cryptography (SINA), e-government, business and automotive security.

“There is an increasing need for writing complex software that meets the highest standards of security. To fully answer this emerging requirement, one needs a state-of-the-art development environment that provides a way to formally verify security properties of the code,” said Cyrille Comar, Managing Director, AdaCore. “AdaCore and Altran Praxis have combined the best of their technology and expertise to answer this need through the product SPARK Pro. We are very pleased to see customers with such demanding requirements as secunet adopting it.”

“The ability to meet multiple levels of certification within the same application is increasingly critical to the successful deployment of complex projects,” said Keith Williams, Altran Praxis Managing Director. “As secunet is demonstrating, SPARK Pro provides the perfect solution for those developing advanced high-security software across the globe. We are delighted to be helping secunet with the development of this important new product line.”

Designed by Altran Praxis, SPARK is a language specifically designed to support the development of software used in applications where correct operation is vital for reasons of safety, security, or both. The SPARK toolset offers static verification that is unrivalled in terms of its soundness, low false-alarm rate, depth and efficiency. The toolset also generates evidence for correctness that can be used to build a constructive assurance case in line with the requirements of industry regulators and certification schemes. There are versions of SPARK based on Ada 83, Ada 95, and Ada 2005, so all standard Ada compilers and tools work out-of-the-box with SPARK.

Press Contacts
press@adacore.com

Leena Chauhan
Altran Praxis
leena.chauhan@altran-praxis.com

AdaCore is a lunch time sponsor for this event. We will have an exhibit table in the break and meal area along with giving a short presentation on AdaCore’s involvement in open source and support for safety and security solutions.

AdaCore is the major sponsor of this Safety-Critical Systems Club event.

Michael Friess will be giving the talk “Working together – The Open Source, industrial approach to building software tools for safety-critical development”.