PERC pioneers MILS-based Secure Java Development

Recent collaboration between Aonix and Wind River has produced an initial integration of Aonix’s PERC Ultra virtual machine technology with the VxWorks MILS platform.  Aonix is very pleased that Wind River has taken PERC on the road and is demonstrating it to clients and prospects as part of their VxWorks MILS introduction activities. (See a live demonstration at the upcoming free Aonix Seminar Series.)

Today’s world has dramatically changed the way we think about secure systems and has escalated the rush to implement applications within a multi-level secure environment.  At the core of these systems is a new realization of secure and safe RTOSs that meet the stringent requirements and policies being set by the U.S. Government for acquisition of IA products in DoD, Homeland Security and other departments. These systems will likely find adoption in the commercial sector where security is also a critical need, such as the financial sector.

Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) identifies the implementation framework to allow time and space separation or partitioning of execution to allow applications with different levels of security to co-exist safely within the same system. 

A number of RTOS vendors are addressing this market with MILS implementations.  For instance, recent work at Wind River has yielded the VxWorks MILS family of products to meet security demands while maintaining consistent, deterministic system performance.  The RTOS enables developers, whether the need is for a few partitions or dozens of partitions, to create and implement a secure system.

But even with the advent of MILS, one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for efficient, dependable, and predictable software development - the kinds of benefits commonly associated with the  Java development paradigm.

Aonix, a decades-long industry leader in real-time and safety critical tools, and pioneer in Java platform technologies, has brought together these two strengths to meet the needs of today’s mission critical developers. As a participant in the Java Community Process and a key contributor to the development of standardized RTSJ profiles for hard real-time and safety critical applications, Aonix is uniquely positioned to make this technology a reality.

While MILS platforms are currently commercially available, there is more work underway to take them to the next level.  In a recent article by Rob Hoffman, vice president and general manager, aerospace and defense at Wind River, published in COTS Journal, he stated, “What does it take to build a real-time system suitable for high-EAL Common Criteria evaluation? Simply put, it can take several years. But even after investing years of hard engineering time and effort, high-EAL certification does not guarantee adequate functionality or performance. Today, there are no high-performance, multilevel secure systems based on the MILS architecture and a commercial operating system.”

Wind River and other MILS implementers are working within the international standards body (ISO/IEC 15408) to create solutions that meet the stringent requirements and test profiles and to begin the process of proving them through accredited test labs.  While this work continues, early adopters are beginning system development using current MILS offerings available and Aonix is pleased to be there to support those efforts with the most appropriate language for their implementation and deployment.

To read more about MILS, please see the following articles:

“Information Assurance Takes Center Stage in RTOS Realm” – Rob Hoffman, vice president and general manager, aerospace and defense at Wind River 

“MILS:Architecture for High-Assurance Embedded Computing” - W. Mark Vanfleet, National Security Agency, Jahn A. Luke, Air Force Research Laboratory, R. William Beckwith, Objective Interface Systems, Carol Taylor, Ph.D., University of Idaho, Ben Calloni, Ph.D., Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, Gordon Uchenick, Objective Interface Systems 

“MILS: High-Assurance Security at Affordable Costs” - Joe Jacob, Objective Interface Systems 

“MILS: Protecting our most vital systems” - Rance J. DeLong, LynuxWorks, Inc.

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Aonix Contributes Ameos UML Technology to Open Source

Aonix announced that it is contributing its powerful Ameos modeling technology to the open source community. Ameos, based on the pioneering Software through Pictures modeling tool family, offers UML profiles to generate C/C++, Ada, Java, CORBA, COM, and EJB. Under the new open source policy, Ameos is available under terms based on the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) as OpenAmeos. This open source strategy for Ameos allows Aonix to focus marketing resources on its expanding PERC technologies for real-time Java developers, while providing the tools to ensure long-term value to Ameos users.

Ameos implements UML 2.0 profiles, model-driven architecture (MDA) -based model transformation and a modern, convenient user interface—features designed to powerfully meet the modeling needs of modern and complex software systems. Through its UML profiles, developers can easily extend standard UML notation and adapt it to project-specific needs. Since the transformation engine is based on MDA architecture, design time is reduced as the model process is able to mature to a greater level prior to implementing target-specific detail.

Aonix believes that the best means of expanding the adoption and evolution of the powerful and stable Ameos technology comes by donating the source code to Ameos users, allowing open-source communities to generously make their own contributions available to others.

For OpenAmeos, strong community support is already in place. ScopeSET, a leading expert in Ameos technology, has partnered with Aonix in this open source initiative. ScopeSET will provide product support and professional services for Ameos and customer-requested derivatives.

“With a long history of developing and supporting Ameos and MDA tools, ScopeSET is pleased to lend its expertise to this important Aonix initiative,” said Armin Mueller of ScopeSET. “Our team is committed to continue providing extensive tool-specific know-how to the OpenAmeos community. We will also act as integrators for future OpenAmeos distributions to ensure quality and further development.”

Ameos is the second major technology contributed by Aonix to the open source community this year. The decision illustrates Aonix’ commitment to selecting licensing terms that best suit the needs of users of each of its product lines. In April, Aonix announced the open source availability of the Aonix Eclipse Ada Development Toolkit. Aonix is leading the new Eclipse-based initiative to create an Ada Development Toolkit (ADT) project and will collaborate with the Eclipse Foundation™ toward that end.

Under the terms of the Ameos open source agreement, a “clean” open source version of Ameos, called OpenAmeos, has been created  to ensure that anyone installing a new version of Ameos will be able to use it freely without encumbrances of any other source contributions. This version is freely downloadable at http://www.openameos.org. In addition, any company or academic institution who wants to distribute OpenAmeos source code is required to also make their changes to the source code freely available to others in order to ensure the continuing open evolution of Ameos.

ObjectAda for Windows Now Supports Vista, .Net 2005

Aonix announced the release of ObjectAda for Windows V8.4. ObjectAda for Windows, the most popular commercial Ada development solution for Windows platforms, provides a complete enterprise-level environment for the development of Windows applications using the Ada programming language. This latest release now enables development on the Microsoft Windows Vista platform and lets developers use ObjectAda with the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 tools. ObjectAda for Windows also plugs seamlessly into the Eclipse environment.

ObjectAda for Windows 8.4 includes the comprehensive Ada libraries needed for calling Windows Win32 and the Visual C++ .NET 2005 MFC interfaces from application source code written in Ada. In ObjectAda for Windows, these Ada binding libraries are fully compatible with the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 tools and libraries. ObjectAda for Windows can either be used standalone or in combination with the Visual Studio .NET 2005 compilers and the latest Windows Platform SDK. ObjectAda for Windows generates symbolic debugging information compatible with the Visual Studio .NET 2005 debugger and thereby enables debugging of complex applications written in multiple languages, such as C/C++ and Ada.

ObjectAda for Windows v8.4 builds on the strengths of this product evident from its inception.  Its strengths are an easy-to-use development environment, excellent compiler performance, and capacity to support development of large and complex mission-critical applications. This latest release enables customers to use ObjectAda in combination with the current suite of Visual Studio .NET 2005 compilers and tools from Microsoft and use the Windows Vista platform for the long-term evolution and maintenance of mission-critical applications. 

In addition to the basic compiler development package, an upgrade package called ObjectAda Project Pack contains AdaJNI, an interface to call Java™ programs from Ada, and the AdaNav™ toolset, which provides complete system HTML source-navigation capabilities as well as call- and unit-tree graphical reporting and automatic data dictionary generation. The AdaNav profiler also offers run-time performance reporting to identify application hot spots.

 For more information on ObjectAda technology click: