Wind River Blog Network

VxWorks Cert Now Supports ARM!

By Alex Wilson

Aerospace and defense has relied on rugged embedded vehicle mounted computers for many years, but as devices become more mobile, and with increased demand to reduce SWaP (Size, Weight, and Power), ARM-based computers become an interesting alternative.  Added to that is the wealth of functionality available in ARM devices that make it a good choice, not only to reduce SWaP in the core CPU, but to reduce overall chipset sizes to a single SoC.

If we look at an example of an ARM-based device, such as the TI OMAP3530, this is a perfect device with which to build a software defined radio for example. It has a high performance, low powered Cortex A8 Core, with numerous IO devices to help connectivity and display.  Designed as a mobile device, for example, it supports Android -- and the OMAP3530 is also well suited to other areas of A&D such as soldier mounted systems, or remote sensors.

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Security Needed Everywhere!

By Alex Wilson

It's been a busy couple of months at Wind River with conferences and seminars as we lead up to year end.  One key theme at the various events I have been to is that of the increased need for cyber-security, a theme that is becoming important in all areas of embedded computing.

The subject first came up in Toulouse at the SAE Aerotech conference.  I was there co-hosting a session with Airbus on use of multicore technology in safety certified systems, with a great presentation by our own Joachim Hampp, and also to present a paper on our VxWorks 653 solution as a guest of BARCO.  Apart from some very interesting sessions on IMA, Unmanned Vehicles, and safety certification, the other critical area was an update on cyber-security with presentations from Airbus, Boeing and government.

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Secure Mobility Message Resonates at MILCOM 2011

By Chip Downing

MILCOM 2011 last week in Baltimore, MD was not only educational, but it was a watershed event.   Last year, it was a “coming out” party for custom Android devices; this year however, was the year where many companies are now using COTS hardware and software to their fullest extent, along the entire supply chain, from core to edge and user devices.   I believe this COTS adoption is driven by two powerful forces – the exploding capabilities of commercial tablet devices, and global military budget pressures.

The vastly increasing power and capability of commercially available mobile communications devices is simply amazing. Just a few years ago, almost everything in this military communications space was purpose built, and most commercial products were simply inadequate to address the rugged and complex system demands of military communications systems.   As seen at MILCOM 2011, this has officially changed -- COTS end-to-end communications domains rule.

So if all of these MILCOM vendors are not making customized hardware and software, what are they doing?   Wind River had over 500 people visit its booth at MILCOM this year, and most of the discussions I had with both suppliers and end users at the show were about increasing device security and leveraging high volume COTS components in demanding deployment scenarios.

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Unmanned Systems: More Reports of Security Vulnerabilities

By Joe Wlad

By now, you’ve likely heard the latest report of security holes in unmanned ground control systems. This time, a key-logging virus has been found on one or more hard drives at the Nevada operations center for the Predator and Reaper unmanned vehicles. While the investigation is ongoing and impact of the virus is determined, the real concern is just how vulnerable are these systems and what might happen next? This is not the first time security gaps have been uncovered in unmanned vehicles. In 2009, Iraqi insurgents were able to intercept unencrypted video feeds from operational Predator UAVs using inexpensive software downloaded from the Internet.

People in the public and private sector are expressing deep concern over how things like this can happen and to how address these problems. As for the “how we got here” question, it’s relatively simple to answer. Essentially, the unmanned air vehicle has been a victim of its own success. Many of these programs, Global Hawk, Predator and others were never designed to be deployed in operational environments. In fact, the DoD in many cases, sought to build these vehicles as prototypes or proof-of-concepts. When the programs were awarded, the diligent contractors for these vehicles used the best of commercial technology to demonstrate the capabilities. The hope was that successful demonstrations would lead to production contracts where the systems could be designed to meet specific security and safety requirements.

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Boeing 787: The long certification journey comes to an end

By Joe Wlad

Today, Boeing delivered its first 787 aircraft to All Nippon Airways (ANA) marking a huge technical, moral and financial achievement. Lorraine Bolsinger, president and CEO, GE Aviation Systems, commented in today’s news release: “This is an opportunity for 787 partners to celebrate their role in bringing the 787 Dreamliner to ANA and the world.” We at Wind River are immensely proud to be part of the supplier team on the Boeing 787 program and our VxWorks 653 operating system environment has enabled Boeing to reduce size, weight and power of the avionics platform thereby reducing aircraft operating costs for its customers.

Certification of the Boeing 787 has been a long road. While some people have focused on the challenges surrounding production and certification delays of the Boeing 787, it’s important to understand how revolutionary this airplane really is. The 787 is the most fuel efficient, technically advanced aircraft ever certified. Given how much new technology is built into the 787, it’s understandable that the certification process took longer than some had hoped. Key attributes of the 787 include a mostly composite aircraft structure (replacing many aluminum parts), elimination of pneumatics to power aircraft systems, a highly efficient wing design and Integrated Modular Avionics which reduce weight and enable reusability of software, among others.

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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.

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Embedded Virtualization to Underpin Next Generation Network-Centric Operations

By Chip Downing

“Embedded virtualization” is a technology that is rapidly proliferating in global defense systems that deliver critical data to warfighters.  Embedded virtualization is typically instantiated in small layer of software called a hypervisor that controls all activities and functions on a microprocessor deployed in a military control and communications equipment.

These hypervisors can be foundations for hosting a wide range of complex, dynamic applications for network-centric operations (NCO), electronic warfare (EW) and spectrum planning/electronic warfare battle management (EWBM) systems. Hypervisors enable the migration of existing capabilities from legacy NCO programs onto next generation platforms, enabling wider integration and preserving program investment.  

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Unmanned Systems No Longer Require Human, or Canine, Participation

By Joe Wlad

Forty-plus years ago, when automatic pilots were first used to perform automatic landings of large aircraft, there was a joke that was circulated among pilots everywhere. Future aircraft would be manned only by a single pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job would be to feed the dog. The dog’s job would be to bite the pilot if she or he touched anything. Today, we’ve advanced well beyond that presageful joke, and airborne systems can now operate autonomously without human, or canine, participation.

One key event taking place this week, that Wind River is exhibiting at, is the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) North America, which showcases the latest trends and technologies in unmanned systems. This event consistently attracts a lot of attention and participation. In fact, this year’s show in Washington, DC is likely to have record participation, which is indicative of the trends we’re seeing in automated and unmanned systems designs.

Ever since hobbyists have demonstrated the ability to control model-sized aircraft using radio signals, engineers conceived of controlling larger-scale unmanned aircraft for both military and civilian purposes. A number of the research efforts for unmanned aircraft over the past two decades have now evolved into larger rate production, and in some cases, deployment in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones. While this is a tribute to the engineers and architects of these designs, one negative consequence of this success is that we now have many unmanned systems that cannot easily coexist with manned aircraft because lack of standards and regulatory requirements for unmanned vehicles. Moreover, the systems in use today are not interoperable. In other words, each unmanned air vehicle is tied to a unique ground station which increases the cost of design and certification.

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Fish Finders, Embedded Linux and Graphics

By Paul Anderson 

Here I am up at rustic cabin in Northern Wisconsin enjoying some time off the grid. I feel like Ralph Waldo Emerson getting in touch with nature, and exploring Transcendentalism, except for one minor detail: I have a wireless connection. Emerson was quoted as saying “Nature hates calculators,” and I’m not sure what he would think about the billions of connected devices scattered across the landscape. Not to worry, I’ll be back unplugged soon enough and enjoying some quality time in the “digital free zone.”

I tried my hand at some fishing this week on the little lake we are on. Even though I’m a gadget person in general, I am a very low tech fisherman. With the help of my brother in law, my kids and I just fished the old fashioned way, with a pole, hook, bobber, and worm. It didn’t take long to find the fish, or for the fish to find us. However, there are plenty of high tech anglers out there that use everything from advanced weather forecast maps, fish finders, and even underwater cameras. I find all that technology interferes with the peace of mind that I am looking for when doing things like fishing, but perhaps that is because I am fully immersed in technology as a career.

Modern high end fish finders, GPS units, and other electronics equipment used in the outdoors have become much more sophisticated. The users of deeply embedded devices have come to expect a graphical user interface, low power consumption, and reliability. A similar trend can be found across a spectrum of deeply embedded devices, including industrial control panels, medical equipment, military applications, and of course, consumer equipment.

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Wind River Named "Transformational"

By Ido Sarig

Voke, Inc. has just released its annual “Market Mover Array Report on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)," and we’re very pleased to see that Wind River’s Device Lifecycle Management solutions were favorably reviewed, and ranked as  “Transformational” - the highest category, reserved for vendors that are changing the tone and direction of the market! 

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In embedded systems, a lifetime is a long time

By Bill Graham

The recent news about the demise of the Mars Rover Spirit (Mike Deliman blogged about this last week) and comments about how it succeeded its mission many times over, got me thinking about just how long product lifetimes are for embedded products (see "End of Mars mission: Way beyond warranty" by Bob McDonald at the CBC). In many industries using embedded software to control devices, the expected lifespan is decades which contrasts sharply to consumer devices where either software is upgraded constantly or we dispose of the device in a few years. On the other hand, embedded systems often exceed originally planned lifespans many times over. Case in point is the Mars Rover program, where Spirit operated six years beyond its original mission plan and rover Opportunity continues operation, surviving a harrowing journey and landing and a harsh Martian environment for so many years.

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IDEF 2011

By Paul Parkinson

Recently, 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).

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And Then There Was One

By Mike Deliman

NASA concludes attempts to contact Mars Rover 'Spirit'

Last night the news of Spirit's mission coming to a close hit my mailbox.

For me, her journey started about eleven years ago.  A call from JPL came to my office phone, it was Glenn.  "Mike, we're putting the team back together, we're going back to Mars."

Those words were like music to my ears.  At the time, when completing the Mars Pathfinder project the thought occurred..."this, then, is the pinnacle of my career, the point  where I can mark as the top of my achievements."  This call changed all of that. There were other projects along the way, Gravity-Probe B and others, but Pathfinder had been fantastic!

Over 3 long years we worked as a team, cogs in a bigger machine making something incredible.  We all put in long hours, working all day on our mission, dreaming at night of what we were working on (it's a human thing).  They began to take on personalities of their own, MER-A being feisty as the "older twin", MER-B cooperating and living the charmed life of the youngest child.  Then came the competition where the children gave our babies their names - Spirit and  Opportunity.  These seemed to be very fitting of our offspring, Spirit surely was full of fitfulness, where as Opportunity was always moving forward.

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Embedded is cool (and getting even cooler)

By Paul Anderson

When people ask me what I do, I never know how to answer the question. Most people state their occupation. But, does that define what we do? I usually respond with something cheeky like “metabolize,” or “provide for those around me” or “go running or fly airplanes any chance I get.” But, usually people want to know what you do for a living. I usually get stumped when they ask that particular question.

I asked my youngest child what he thought I did for a living. He said “play with computers all day,” which is not entirely inaccurate. I asked my oldest, and he said “fly airplanes” (again, I do fly a lot of airplanes, but unfortunately I spend most of my time as a passenger rather than a pilot). My pets would say my entire existence is dedicated to providing them food and entertainment (obviously they have figured something out). My wife would say that I type on the computer, talk on the phone, go to meetings, and spend way too much time in airplanes and at hotels. Although accurate, it doesn’t get at the core of what I do.

When I try to explain to people what I do in any detail, after a minute or so I see their eyes glaze over. I have taken to just saying “I’m in the software business.” I can usually get away with that, but sometime people actually want to know more.

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Getting Started with OpenSAF

By Glenn Seiler

Usage of OpenSAF is growing exponentially. The number of companies I hear from that are evaluating or considering using OpenSAF grows every month. A common trend that I see more and more often is that someone in an R&D capacity or someone charged with creating a prototype downloads OpenSAF from opensaf.org and begins working with it, to acquaint them with the technology.  For example, if you are a Wind River Linux user, you can download a pristine version of OpenSAF software directly from the Wind River Developers Network that has been pre-validated and packaged to build with Wind River’s Linux Distribution Assembly Tool (LDAT).  The version of OpenSAF you can download from Wind River Developer Network is exactly the same as the current version of OpenSAF at devel.opensaf.org, except it has been put into a ‘layer’ that is recognized and used by Wind River’s build environment. This can save significant time and effort for companies that want to do a quick analysis or build of OpenSAF.

The most common method for getting support or help for OpenSAF projects is by utilizing “community support.” The Wind River Developer Network is a great place to look for answers or to post a question. This is where members of Wind River’s OpenSAF and Linux engineering community can help. In addition, the OpenSAF project has many helpful documents and mailing lists that can provide help.  There are many mailing lists that you should consider subscribing to, including a developers mailing list that is used by many of the actual developers contributing code to the OpenSAF project.

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The Best Software On Any Planet

By Mike Deliman

In 1995, after finishing up on a particularly challenging project, my boss came to me with a new project.  He asked, “Have you ever heard of Jet Propulsion Laboratory?   Would you like to work with them?”  Without hesitation, I jumped at the offer to sign on.

 I grew up not too far from JPL, and as a child I was a big fan of the space industry, as well as the TV show Star Trek.  I not only knew that JPL was part of NASA, but also that JPL made space probes. 

This was my first real space project.  At the time, I was the most junior member of the team.  Our team was comprised of several engineers at JPL, several at Loral Federal Space Systems, and a handful of folks at Wind River.  The mission was Mars Pathfinder, the first attempt from NASA to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software and a COTS computer to put a robot on another planet.  I was honored to join the team.

The plan was to build a robot that would land on the surface of Mars, and perform some science experiments.  A remote-control rover was added to the payload.  The robot was to land on Mars and operate in-situ for a month.   Our task was to port the VxWorks operating system to this processor, new to us, for the first time.  The processor was based on the IBM RS6000.

This task was a top-to-bottom port of the operating system to the CPU.  This required an in-depth understanding of how the CPU operated on all levels, and an understanding of the division between the CPU, Board Support, and the OS itself.  It even required understanding how various compiler tools handled the ABI, and later the EABI, for the architecture.  I had never worked on a complete architecture port before this.

This was – to that point in time – the most demanding job I had ever done.  And it was the most fun, as well as the most cooperative team I’d worked with.  I learned an incredible amount, enough to tie-together everything I’d learned about computing in university, and more.

We worked some incredibly long hours, and made our milestones and deliveries.  In December of 1996, we were invited to the product launch proceedings at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  As special guests, we had passes to park near the launch area and sit in grandstands just 5 miles away from the pad. It was an awe-inspiring sight. I felt like a real VIP.

In July 1997, I attended the landing ceremonies for family and friends of Pathfinder at JPL in Pasadena.  When the first image came back from Mars, the entire assembly erupted in fantastic celebration – we had landed on Mars!

Happy anniversary Wind River!

Is Linux Secure?

By Paul Anderson

It’s the wrong question, really. Are my financial and medical records secure? What about all that information stored in the cloud? What about my desktop computer or cell phone? What about the power grid and other infrastructure? Should I be worried?

The answer to all those questions is “It depends on what you mean by ‘secure.’” One may need to consider: What is the definition security? Or what is an acceptable level of risk at that level of security?

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Wind River Turns 30: Looking Back and Moving Forward

By Tomas Evensen 

2011 marks Wind River’s 30th anniversary. The big 3-0…it’s a major landmark moment in anyone’s book. This year, we’ll be taking time to honor this milestone with a retrospective of Wind River’s history and also a series of employee stories.  In my many years with the company, Wind River always impressed on me the concept of  being bigger than just a single product or technology. There is an underlying spirit within our teams that constantly reaches for more, for some greater innovation. While many customers know Wind River for the VxWorks real-time operating system, it was always part of the vision to provide more value. In the early days, this entailed providing a TCP/IP stack and GDB for debugging. Later, additional value came from strong IDE support through Tornado and Workbench. Lately, it has been by providing a choice of operating systems, real-time or open source/Linux. 

A standout example that exemplified the vision of providing a more complete solution was when we embarked on creating a truly embedded hypervisor. In 2004, it had already become clear to us that virtualization would play an important role in embedded designs at some point in the future. In early 2005, Paul Borman who worked for me in the CTO Office created a very impressive prototype, called eCPU, that ran VxWorks and Linux on a single CPU and we learned a lot from that effort. When Johan Fornaeus came on board in 2006 through an acquisition (he was co-founder of Interpeak and before that, one of the co-designers of the Enea/OSE operating system), I had him leading a small nimble task force team to develop a hypervisor really suited for the embedded space. I felt we made a real breakthrough. This was not a repackaged operating system pretending to be something it was not designed for, but instead a truly unique approach to virtualization and separation. Over the next couple years, this small team created a scalable product with an extremely tight footprint, incredible performance, while at the same time being full featured for the common architectures such as Intel, Power, ARM and MIPS.

Back in those days, it was not clear to us when and how important multi-OS systems would be in the future, but today it is hard to imagine how to deal with these new complex systems without a hypervisor for embedded virtualization. Looking at my team’s achievement now, I still marvel at how the Wind River Hypervisor brings together multi-core and our various operating systems. Why choose between operating systems with different characteristics when you can mix them in one system? Throw in a networking stack optimized for multi-core and tools that can debug and find performance bottlenecks and you get a very capable foundation on which our customers can innovate.

By constantly looking to the future, Wind River continues to evolve and further build on its expertise. The ongoing push to innovate may have created interesting and complex challenges along the way. However, it has also resulted in celebrations and breakthroughs, and it’s undoubtedly a big reason why so many of us continue to stay on the ride. 

 

Fun with VxWorks MILS 2.1

By Paul Parkinson

It's been awhile since my previous blog, as I have been rather preoccupied with responding to a number of RFPs. However, I’ve managed to find some time to work on some demos for VxWorks MILS 2.1, which has been fun.

VxWorks MILS 2.1 introduced support for Wind River Linux as a Guest OS (VxWorks Guest OS and High Assurance Environment (HAE) having been supported in the earlier VxWorks MILS 2.0 release). I wanted to get some more hands-on experience of using Wind River Linux as a Guest OS (GOS) running on the VxWorks MILS 2.1 Separation Kernel (SK). So, I started with a version of theBlaster Blastee demo which had been modified by one of my colleagues in Engineering to use a Linux GOS partition for the Blaster. (Blaster Blastee is a well-known Wind River demo which provides a nice flexible framework for blasting TCP or UDP packets between nodes, testing network connectivity and performance).

 I thought it would be an interesting exercise to extend the demo to also use Linux in a second partition as the Blastee (receiver), to demonstrate the scalability and determinism of the MILS SK with multiple Linux virtual boards (VB).

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Rendezvous with a Rock

By Mike Deliman

MESSENGER spacecraft is approaching it's rendezvous with Mercury.  After flying for over 2400 days, in a little over 24 hours (from writing this)  MESSENGER will maneuver into orbit, the first time a satellite has orbited Mercury.  We hope to learn a lot about the composition of the surface and effects of solar weathering of the surface.  And there's the prospect of photographing the sun-side of the planet for the fist time!

In a few months, Dawn spacecraft will orbit Asteroid Vesta - the first time we've orbited an asteroid.  We hope to learn more about the composition of asteroids.   (We've landed on one, but technically it's harder to orbit than to land.  We've also successfully landed on a comet with Deep Imact...)  Dawn has not been in flight as long as MESSENGER, but it's orbital attempt is none the less impressive (Vesta is much smaller than Mercury).

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Remarkable

By Mike Deliman

"Space... the final frontier" is how the pre-recorded message from NASA to the crew of Discovery started this morning.

This afternoon while covering the final departure of Discovery from the ISS, the newsman said "Remarkable - a remarkable bit of technology and a lasting mark on history" - or something to that effect. I thought "Remarkable" - that's a word Spock used to describe fantastic new technologies that had never been seen before. Things like Ion Drive in an autonomous space probe, or a life form that lives on something we'd considered impossible.

Some remarkable technologies demonstrated recently in the news include things like Northrop Gruman's X47B UCAS, and the comet flybys of Stardust NExT and DI Epoxi, and ongoing announcements of potentially hundreds of earth-like planets being found by Kepler Space Telescope.

One of the remarkable technologies just delivered to the ISS by Discovery is Robonaut R2.

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The Dawn of a Paradigm Shift in Embedded Device Software Security

By Marc Brown

The number of connected embedded and mobile devices is increasing exponentially, predicted to be in excess of 50 billion by 2020.  The lion’s share of this growth is expected to come from traditional market segments where there is an increasing push to transform sensing equipment to more autonomous embedded control, real-time telemetry, and proactive diagnostics. We all know website hacking is nothing new, but just imagine having your public water utility meter, your automobile safety functions, our public transportation traffic sensors, or even the national power grid being hacked by organized criminals or nation states.  This tsunami of connectivity and more intelligent control is creating a huge increase in security vulnerabilities that can impact financial profitability, public services and safety, and national defense. 

Many of today’s most advanced embedded control systems are based on a collection of standalone components – embedded operating systems, virtualization technologies, communication stacks, middleware, and application code.  These standalone products, and the companies that create them, lack the integrated security support required in today’s highly connected world, offering overall solutions that are only as safe as the weakest link. 

McAfee and Wind River have formed a strategic partnership to develop and support comprehensive, purpose-built security solutions specifically designed for these next-gen embedded devices.  

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Autonomy and Robotic Advancement

By Mike Deliman

A few months ago at the Robotics Virtual Trade Show, in my presentation I spoke about the evolution of robotic systems.  One thing I predicted was as time goes on, robots will become more independent and autonomous, performing more of the work humans and mainframe-style systems have traditionally performed.  

Among the robots I talked about were robots similar to NASA's 
Stardust Spacecraft  Stardust is currently on course for a Valentine's Day rendezvous with Comet Temple-1.  Stardust includes a package that performs autonomous navigation, d to help keep the craft on it's flight path with reduced intrusion from ground-based systems.  Since Stardust is so far out from earth, there is significant delay in round-trip communications.  Stardust is able to detect problems in trajectory and perform course correction maneuvers on its own.

Last week, Northrop Grumman had  first-flight for an evolution in Un-maned Aerial Vehicles.  The 
X47B UCAS   is an autonomous unmanned flight system.  It is not a wireless-joystick system.  It flies itself, taking off, figuring a course to it's way points, landing.  Without human intervention.

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Safety-Critical Systems Symposium 2011

By Paul Parkinson

I'm looking forward to the 19th annual Safety-Critical Systems Symposium which is being held in held in the UK next week.

The conference programme covers a range of subjects including safety cases, testing of safety-critical systems, updates to safety standards, and technologies. On the Thursday afternoon, I will be presenting a paper Safety, Security and Multicore.

Wind River will be participating in the exhibition which is being held on the Wednesday, and we will have a live demo of VxWorks MILS 2.0 running on the stand. So why not pop by to discuss your safety & security requirements?

 

Cybersecurity Testing & Trusted Platforms

By Paul Parkinson

In 2009, security concerns were raised about the use of Chinese telecoms equipment in the UK's critical national infrastructure ('Spy chiefs fear Chinese cyber attack', The Times), and the potential for the equipment to be inadvertently or deliberately subverted in a cyber attack.

So, I was interested to read a ZDNet UK news article last week about the Chinese telecoms company Huawei opening a cybersecurity testing centre in the UK to certify its products for use in the UK's critical national infrastructure. The centre will be staffed entirely by security-cleared UK nationals who will work in collaboration with CESG (part of the UK government intelligence agency GCHQ) as part of the certification process to ensure that the evaluations meet the government's highest security standards.

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COTS in Space: Enter The Dragon

By Mike Deliman

Congratulations to Space Exploration Technologies Inc, on their successful venture into orbit.  By launching the Dragon into orbit, successfully orbiting the earth more than once, and returning to the ground, you've made history.

I wish I could have watched the launch and later the landing.  This is absolutely a historic event.

Given the cancellation of the Ares projects, and the recent failure of the launch of the GLONASS satellites, it would seem SpaceX has impeccable timing.

I don't think there was really a question about weather or not commercial entities could handle space exploration and the creation of rockets.  One of the big questions was "could it be done safely without all the oversight?" 

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VxWorks helping commercial spaceflight become a reality

By Bill Graham

The successful launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket (I should really say "launch vehicle") today was another great step for commercial spaceflight. The Falcon 9 has already successfully reached orbit in June 2010, but at that time it didn't have a payload. This latest launch is the first to carry SpaceX Dragon capsule which was successfully recovered after the flight.

SpaceX  launch vehicles are the epitome of  Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solutions. By successfully building, testing and launching commercial spaceflight vehicles they are demonstrating that COTS solutions are not only cheaper to produce but can be equally successful and achieve desired program goals.

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Habitability: The Argument Of Life

By Mike Deliman

Or, Star Trek to NASA: you've found my Horta!

What is life?  We used to think we had a good answer for that.  Recently we thought there were a handful of chemicals that were necessary for life, among them, Phosphorus.   Phosphorus is found throughout any living body - bones, cell walls, energy transport, proteins, even DNA.  In fact it is so necessary for life and so common inside a cell that it is possible to compute how much phosphorus must be contained in a given cell in order for it to function.

What our scientists have found is a microbe along the shores of Mono Lake that is able to substitute arsenic for phosphorous. 

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BUT Can the Commercial Sector do Space?

By Mike Deliman

With the recent demise of the ARES program, we are left without an institutional solution for accessing  space. Not just returning to the Moon, etc, but maintaining our presence in orbit (ISS) without relying on someone else's technology for transportation.  The cancellation of that program leaves a staggering hole in our plans for exploring space over the next 20 years.  These were our "heavy lifters" - the machines designed to carry serious payloads aloft - the enablement of such grand plans as returning to the Moon and establishing a laboratory there, and carrying Man to Mars and beyond.  The reasons cited were over-runs in costs and budgeted time.  The idea was that the commercial sector would step in and show the Government "how to do space."

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Military Aerospace & Electronics Show UK

 By Paul Parkinson

I am looking forward to attending the UK's Military, Aerospace & Electronics Show, which will take place on 30th November.

This year's conference programme has a strong emphasis on open systems architectures, but there is also an increasing focus on Information Security. To complement these themes, there will be a live demonstration of the VxWorks MILS separation kernel on the Wind River exhibition stand, so if you are planning to attend the event, please drop by.

During the afternoon session, my colleague Stuart Gray & I will be running a workshop 'A Practical Foundation for Safety Innovation'.  As an introduction, I will be giving a brief overview on the capabilities of the VxWorks 6 Cert Platform and explaining how it can be used to develop mission-critical and safety-critical systems requiring certification up to DO-178B Level A, but most of the session will be spent providing delegates with hands-on access to the VxWorks 6 Cert Platform. We recommend that you sign up in advance to avoid disappointment as workshop places are limited.