IDEF 2011

Last week, I attended the IDEF 2011 defence trade show in Instanbul as part of the Wind River team exhibiting on the Tektronik (Turkish distributor) stand.

Our partner, Curtiss-Wright, who were also exhibiting at the event, had kindly lent me a VPX chassis and VPX6-185 board, which I used to demonstrate a Cross-Domain Solution (CDS) demo running on VxWorks MILS. The demo filters packets of data between black and red networks based on the security classification of the data, and uses multiple partitions to implement sender and receiver on different interfaces.

The demo currently uses a simple encryption algorithm for data passed over the black network (which wouldn't present much of a challenge to GCHQ/CESG or NSA),  so I decided to replace it with a stronger encryption algorithm which is more appropriate for real world systems. I initially considered using an open source implementation of AES-256, but then I remembered the export controls on 256-bit AES, so I decided to use a public domain implementation of the Russian GOST 28147-89 (which also uses a 256-bit keys).

I managed to get the GOST encrypt and decrypt routines running fine natively under Windows, and also on the VxWorks Simulator running on the Windows host, but I could not get the GOST decrypt routine to work correctly on the PowerPC target board. It turns out that the GOST algorithm assumes that it's running on a little-endian processor! So, I had to stick with the simple encryption algorithm for the time being, and will have to wait until the Cross-Domain demo is running on VxWorks MILS on Intel architecture before I can use GOST.

Finally, some of my colleagues have been blogging about Wind River's 30th anniversary recently, and some of the things that they have got up to at Wind River. As I've spent my time at Wind working in the Aerospace & Defence sector, there are plenty of cool projects which I've worked on over the years which I can't discuss, but there a some highlights which can mention. For example, it's not every day you get the opportunity to sit in the cockpit of an F-16!