Aerospace & Defense

Avionics Europe 2013 Conference

By Paul Parkinson

Last week I attended the Avionics Europe 2013 conference, which was held in Munich for the last time perhaps (as it is moving to Abu Dhabi in 2014).

The theme of this year's conference was 'Tackling the Challenges in Avionics: Single Sky Many Platforms,' which continued to focus on the growth in air traffic across Europe and challenges arising for air traffic management and navigation. However, rather than continuing to focus on the regulatory challenges as in 2012 (which I have discussed previously), there was a shift in emphasis towards the implementation of technologies such as SESAR.

One of the keynote speakers, Captain Sascha Unterbarnscheidt, A320 Captain and Director Operations Support, Lufthansa Germany made some very interesting observations in his address 'Single European Sky - Delivery to Daily Operations.' In particular, how the fragmented European air space (compared to the United States), led to ATM inefficiencies in 2011 resulting in 17.9m minutes of ATM delays, 8.1m tonnes of wasted CO2, and increased costs of around 5billion Euros (with the effect on passengers of delayed flights, longer flight times, wasted fuel and increased noise). He then went on to explain how the increased levels of automation and productivity through SESAR would result in increased capacity, reduced costs and lower accident rates.

The impact and benefits of SESAR were also discussed in a number of other presentations at the conference, but the one which really caught my attention was the one which proposed changing the ATM model from peer-to-peer communication over proprietary network infrastructure, to making all airborne and ground-based information available to all users on (publicly-accessible) IP-based networks. I was alarmed at the obvious security implications of this approach, but the potential cyber security threats and their mitigation weren't even mentioned during the presentation. When networking critical infrastructure systems together, security must be considered from the outset rather than as an afterthought!

I also presented a conference paper, 'Use of ARINC 653 and ARINC 661 in Developing a Touch Screen Avionics Display,' which I had co-authored with David Randall of Presagis. This included a discussion on the requirements of the upgrade of a cockpit avionics display for a military rotary-wing platform, and the use of standards-based architectures including ARINC 653 and ARINC 661 with COTS hardware platforms. The paper also presented the experience gained by the use of these technologies on a European military helicopter programme, including the benefits in overcoming hardware obsolescence and the contributions towards reductions in operational and through-life costs.

If you weren't able to attend the conference, we will make the paper available on the Wind River website soon.

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Avionics Europe 2012 Report

By Paul Parkinson

I've just got back from the Avionics Europe 2012 conference and exhibition which was held in Munich.

The theme of this year's conference was 'Common Sky: Operating in One Air Space' focussing on the growth in air traffic across Europe, the challenges arising for air traffic management and navigation, and the development of SESAR air traffic management technologies.

I was keen to hear to how changes to the high-level policies would drive regulatory changes and drive technology requirements.

I didn't have to wait very long, as in his keynote speech, Brigadier General Hans-Georg Schmidt (Vice Commander of 1st German Air Division, and Chairman of the Military Air Traffic Management Board of EUROCONTROL) discussed the implications of the integration of unmanned systems (UAVs, UCAVs) into non-segregated airspace. He discussed the need for unmanned systems to be "sufficiently safe as not to reduce the overal safety of airspace," and said that unmanned systems "must be proven to be safe before their introduction into this environment." (The keynote speech is discussed in more detail by John Keller, conference chairman, in this blog post).

This subject of UAV safety certification was covered in more technical detail by Richard Seitz of Cassidian in his presentation on 'UAV Computing'. He discussed the differences between flight software on piloted aircraft (which leaves the ultimate decision to the pilot) and flight software in unmanned systems which becomes safety-critical in the case of datalink loss,  and the need for RTCA DO-178B / EUROCAE ED-12B safety certification of UAV flight software. 

It was encouraging to see the subject of UAV safety and the need for software certification being acknowledged, as this was a topic which I had also raised in my conference paper  in the context of combined safety and security requirements for unmanned systems (for details see my previous blog).

The other recurring theme at the conference which caught my attention both in the conference and in the exhibition, was the technology disruption of multicore processor architectures, which provides some exciting opportunities for reducing the size, weight and power (SWaP) of avionics systems, but also presents new challenges for hardware and software safety certification. However, there's now significant momentum in the research into these areas, and the experience gained should lead to regulatory guidance and adoption in the near future.

So overall it was an interesting and enjoyable conference, not least for the fine Bavarian hospitality!

Avionics 2012 conference

By Paul Parkinson

It's been a long time since my previous blog, as unfortunately I've been engrossed in a number of projects!

However, I have just got time to mention that I'm really looking forward to the Avionics Europe conference in Munich on 21-22 March. The conference programme is pretty packed, covering cockpit avionics and technologies for civil and military aircraft; and aircraft, spacecraft and UAV sensor payloads, diagnostics and certification.

I will be presenting a paper on "A Secure Virtualisation Approach to Support Multi-Level Secure Systems, Software Reuse and Incremental Certification" in the Embedded Software session on Wednesday afternoon.

The paper addresses how secure virtualisation approaches can be used to implement a system architecture to securely partition applications and data of different security domains on the same system (such as national Secret and NATO Secret data), whilst enabling the reuse of previously developed software applications and existing intellectual property in an open standards-based communications environment. The paper also includes a discussion on the requirements for supporting incremental safety-certification under RTCA DO-178C / EUROCAE ED-12C and Common Criteria security evaluation at high evaluation assurance levels, and the implementation architecture to support a role-based development process.

Wind River will also be exhibiting at the conference, so why not drop by our stand for a chat and to see a cool avionics display demo?

Linux, Common Criteria and OS Protection Profiles

By Paul Parkinson

In 2011, computer and network security news stories, which were previously the preserve of specialist journals and blogs, have become commonplace in the mainstream media. There are now many different types of threat, which are sometimes categorised into hacktivist, e-crime and most recently, advanced persistent threats (APT). Whilst some of these attacks have exploited zero day vulnerabilities, many of these attacks have simply taken advantage of the fact that systems have not been configured securely for their deployment environment.

To use an easy–to-understand analogy, consider a wireless router. This device will generally be shipped from the factory in the most flexible, open communication configuration, which will have many or all of the security options disabled. This will be fine if the wireless router is intended to be used as a free public Wi-Fi access point (e.g., cyber cafe), but not for a private business or home office if you want to prevent drive-by wireless hacks).  In these cases, wireless encryption such as WPA2 will need to be enabled for the router and clients, and access may even need to be restricted to specific clients via MAC addresses, etc.

For the developer wanting to create a secure product using embedded Linux, the wealth of configurable functionality and security packages can seem overwhelming. In the critical device space, the key question is, "How can one create a Linux configuration for their product which can be secure and meet the security requirements of the product's targeted international markets?"  The answer is straightforward and well defined - use standards-based approaches to both configure and prove security robustness.

For IT security, there is one globally-recognised standard, Common Criteria, that a product can be evaluated against, and this evaluation ensures that connected IT products are performed to high and consistent standards. Because Common Criteria is now recognized by 26 countries, product security evaluation using this standard eliminates the burden of duplicating security evaluations in multiple countries by providing international mutual recognition of evaluated products.

To accelerate the Common Criteria evaluation, the product can be developed according to the approved Protection Profile (PP) to ensure that it meets the accepted security requirements for that class of product. A Protection Profile is a document that defines the combination of threats, security objectives, assumptions, security functional requirements (SFRs), security assurance requirements (SARs) and rationales for a specific security target (ST). The PP is used to substantiate vendors' claims of a given family of information system products. The PP for a particular device typically specifies the Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL), a number 1 through 7, indicating the depth and rigour of the security evaluation, usually in the form of supporting documentation and testing, that a product meets the security requirements specified in the PP. In the United Kingdom, CESG supports Common Criteria evaluation and the use of PPs; in the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have agreed to cooperate on the development of validated US government PPs.

Common Criteria testing and evaluation can be quite expensive, and adds significant risk to any programme. To help eliminate much of this risk, Wind River has taken this approach for the development of Wind River Linux Secure, a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) product which has been certified by NIAP under the US Common Criteria Evaluation Scheme to Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ (EAL4 being the highest level which is mutually recognised internationally under the Common Criteria Recognition Arrangement, and "+" referring to the evaluation being augmented with the Security Assurance Requirement ALC_FLR.3, the highest level of systematic flaw remediation).

Wind River Linux Secure was evaluated against the US Government Protection Profile for General Purpose Operating Systems in a Networked Environment (US GP-OSPP). This is a new protection profile which was published by the US National Security Agency's Information Assurance Directorate in August 2010, and supersedes the earlier Role-Based Access Control Protection Profile (RBAC) which was 'sunsetted' from 1st September 2011.

With this COTS GP-OSPP foundation, we expect that evaluating Linux products under similar PPs, like the German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI) General Purpose Operating System Protection Profile (BSI GP-OSPP) can also be undertaken. The BSI OSPP is also published on the Common Criteria portal, and defines the specific requirements for the German security market. Although there are two separate general-purpose operating system protection profiles, with some specific differences in Security Functional Requirements, there is a lot of commonality, and Wind River’s experience in evaluating a full-featured Linux distribution from kernel.org removes considerable risk from other programmes requiring Common Criteria certification using the US GP-OSPP, BSI GP-OSPP, or other evaluation scheme.

VxWorks MILS 2.1 Platform hands-on

By Paul Parkinson

I visited Wind River headquarters in Alameda, California, to learn about VxWorks MILS Platform 2.1 and to get hands-on experience with the release.

I had been looking forward to the trip, as the 2.1 release adds some significant new capabilities: Wind River Linux as a guest operating system and the new High Assurance Network Stack (see Bill Graham's recent blog for a more detailed overview).

So, the VxWorks MILS separation kernel (SK) can now host Wind River Linux, VxWorks and a High Assurance Environment as guest operating systems in a virtualised environment (as shown below).

To me this is a very significant development, as it extends the depth and breadth of applications which can be run in on top of VxWorks MILS. This enables existing applications to he hosted securely in a high robustness system, but also enables new systems to be developed using the most appropriate technologies for a given component.

Of course, learning the theory is great, but it is not as much fun as hands-on experience, so I was glad to have the opportunity to run some Wind River Linux demo applications on top of VxWorks MILS and run and debug them using Wind River Workbench while I was in Alameda.

The screenshot below shows Workbench debugging a multi-threaded Linux application running on top of VxWorks MILS 2.1 on my PowerPC 8548-based demo board. There's a thread-specific breakpoint on a line of shared code, which can be used to halt one thread while the other thread(s) run free. 

The next step will be to incorporate these new capabilities into some MILS demos. Stay tuned.

EGNOS Satellite Navigation System Safety Certification

By Paul Parkinson

In case you missed it, yesterday Wind River announced that VxWorks has been selected for the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), and has been chosen to run the Integrity Processing Facility (IPF) check set.

The IPF, developed and delivered by Logica, is the crucial element that validates the information broadcast by the satellites to safety-critical users such as aircraft in flight or ships navigating through narrow channels. This is essential, because satellite navigation systems alone do not provide sufficient positional accuracy to be used in safety-critical applications.

The IPF is really good example of a critical system which needs to consistently provide hard real-time performance and total reliability, and this posed some interesting challenges for development and safety certification to the joint avionics software safety standards RTCA DO-178B and EUROCAE ED-12B at Level B.

Logica and the European Space Agency (ESA) have kindly allowed us to produce a case study which discusses the development and certification challenges and how they were successfully overcome, and this has just been published on the Electronics Weekly website. (Update: the case study can now also be downloaded in PDF from the Wind River website)

I hope you'll find this interesting, and the next time you are on a European flight on a landing approach in very poor visibility conditions, you'll know how VxWorks is helping to guide the aircraft to a safe landing.

The Open Group: Real-Time Embedded Systems Forum, Rome

By Paul Parkinson

Last week, I attended the The Open Group, Rome 2010 conference, specifically the Real-Time Embedded Systems Forum track (agenda), in order to participate in the MILS API standardization working group sessions.

The goal of the working group is to produce a standardized API for a Minimal Runtime (MRT) environment which is suitable for High Assurance systems, which will enable portability of middleware between MILS platforms and aid interoperability. The working group wrestled with some fundamental aspects of the MRT, including goals/objectives, characteristics and implementation architecture, but these were productive sessions. There's still a long way to go, but these were important steps in the right direction. Watch this space for further developments!

It was also useful to have the opportunity to attend the RTES Forum presentations. Some of the highlights for me were Ed Roberts of Elparazim's presentations on AADL, Olaf Tetteo of Brightsight's presentation on 'Certification & Mutual Recognition above EAL-4 in Europe', and my colleague Alex Wilson's presentation on 'Challenges of Multicore, potential impact on Safety Critical and High Assurance Security Environments'. Open Group members can download the proceedings from here (login required).

With such a packed agenda, I was worried that we might not have an opportunity to see the delights of Rome, but fortunately for the Tuesday evening, The Open Group had arranged a tour of the stunning Capitoline Museum followed by the conference dinner on the rooftop terrace which had a spectacular view of the city skyline.

Police Drone: Episode 2

By Paul Parkinson

On Thursday last week, I read that an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) had been recently used by the UK's Merseyside Police in the tracking and arrest of two suspected car thieves (BBC News:'Merseyside police drone tracks car theft suspects').

A quick Google search revealed some additional details in the Liverpool Echo ('Merseyside police make UK's first ever flying drone arrest'), specifically that the UAV had been used in thick fog.

I was really surprised when I read this, because this type of UAV is remotely-piloted, requiring line-of-sight operation, and does not have autonomous 'see and avoid' capabilities (unlike some more sophisticated autonomous military UAVs). So how could it be remotely-piloted safely in poor visibility conditions and in an urban environment?

I was struggling to reconcile this with the fact that the UK Civil Aviation Authority is carefully researching the integration of UAVs into civil airspace, and there are still a number of safety issues to be addressed. I had even discussed some of these, urban environments in particular, in the blog post 'Police Drone' in May 2007 when the media had been reporting the Merseyside Police's UAV trials (BBC News: 'Pilotless Police Drone Takes Off').

However, things began to make more sense when I read about more recent developments of the story, which were reported earlier this week (BBC News: 'Unlicensed Merseyside Police drone grounded' and Guardian: 'Eye in the sky arrest could land Police in the dock'). These reveal that the UAV was being flown by Merseyside Police without a CAA license, and this breach of regulations could lead to prosecution.

So Merseyside Police could be involved in a different type of UAV trial soon...

Case study: Ultra Datel safety-critical avionics upgrade using COTS

By Paul Parkinson

I recently had the privilege of working with one of our partners, LDRA, and one of our customers, Ultra Datel, on writing a case study of their experiences of a mid-life upgrade of an existing avionics system.

What caught my attention was the fact that the existing system was uncertified, and the upgrade involved migrating the existing system to a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and undertaking DO-178B Level B safety certification.

As a result, the project faced a number of development challenges because the pre-existing software and device drivers were not developed with safety certification in mind, and the code needed to be re-engineered and modified to meet safety certification requirements.

In the case study, we discuss the following development challenges and how they were overcome using the LDRA Tool Suite during the development of the safety-critical VxWorks application running on a GE Intelligent Platforms ruggedised PowerPC platform:

1. Porting to the VxWorks DO-178B safety-critical subset
2. Reduction of high cyclomatic complexity
3. Programming language subset compliance
4. Code coverage to meet DO-178B Level B objectives

The case study has now been published on the Wind River website on the Aerospace & Defence customers page (and the PDF file can be accessed directly here).

First flight of the Boeing 787

By Paul Parkinson

Today, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner made its first flight from Everett, Washington. One of our Wind River colleagues, Chip Downing, was able to attend this historic event in person, and shot the following video:

This is the culmination of years of development of a completely new aircraft which uses many state-of-the-art technologies to significantly improve efficiency, operating range and passenger comfort.

For instance, the 787 employs an Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture using VxWorks 653, Wind River's world-class ARINC 653 compliant RTOS. This approach which drastically reduces the amount of space, weight and power (SWaP) required for the aircraft's on-board avionics systems. The reduction in weight of avionics systems and cabling results in a reduced fuel load requirement, or increased range for the same fuel load, and of course reduced CO₂ emissions. Similarly, the reduction in the space required for the avionics systems can increase the space available for passengers, luggage and cargo.

(If you want to know more about the 787 development and DO-178B safety certification approach, read Alex Wilson's recent blog, and for details of VxWorks 653, there's a white paper available for download here).

In addition, the composite fuselage not only helps to make the aircraft lighter (improving fuel consumption further), but also enables higher cabin pressures to be used, which will result in passengers feeling more relaxed and less fatigued. When coupled with the advanced air-conditioning systems and state-of-the-art Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 jet engines and noise-reductions technologies, this provides the promise of greater passenger comfort on long haul flights.

This is of course, just the start, as the 787 will continue to evolve through its operational lifetime, just as the 747 has done over the last forty years. So, I wonder what other technologies will appear in the future?

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to seeing the 787 grace the skies above the Farnborough Air Show and taking a flight on one with British Airways in the near future. Congratulations, Boeing!