Pioneering Technology for Military-Grade Software

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Military applications are unique in combining high safety stakes and system criticality with maintenance requirements and service life spanning decades. Software systems often need to be ported across generations of hardware and require development environments that provide excellent portability and stability.

In addition to these, an ever-increasing threat over the past decade has been cybersecurity attacks. In the current digital era, the intersection of cybersecurity and military technology has brought new levels of vulnerability to critical defense systems. With the increased digitization of military operations, from weapons systems to autonomous drones, the risks of cyber espionage, sabotage, and operational disruption continue to grow.

A new level of effort is required to produce a system that can maintain its required and expected integrity level. 

With diesel vehicles accounting for 30% to 50% of greenhouse emissions at a mine site, replacing them with a battery-electric fleet is a sure way to drastically reduce overall CO₂ emissions, but how else can mines benefit from this technology?

Leading underground manufacturers Normet believe the answer lies with SmartDrive. This architecture for battery electric vehicles (BEV) was developed in collaboration with customers, building on feedback, predicting future trends, and assessing the limitations of diesel engines, and comes with a wealth of benefits for operators.

The Ada programming language was initially designed following a contract from the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede over 450 programming languages used by the DoD at that time. Over the past 30 years, it has become the standard for developers of high-integrity military applications. It is designed specifically for large, long-lived applications where reliability, efficiency, safety, and security are vital. As an ISO standard, Ada constantly evolves and stays true to its original mandate.

Ada is often used in conjunction with other languages on large, mission-critical systems, and the Ada design specifically caters to such usage, enabling customers to leverage their investment in Ada across the broadest range of development platforms.

Due to the critical nature of their operations, military systems demand exceptionally high levels of reliability, security, and performance. Memory-safe programming languages ensure these systems function as intended and remain secure against threats.

At Eurosatory Patria launched a concept tracked vehicle created within an international cooperation project; the EU funded European Future Highly Mobile Augmented Armoured Systems (FAMOUS) programme. The FAMOUS consortium is led by Patria and the goal for the programme is to develop the next generation armoured vehicles and situational awareness systems that enhance ground combat capabilities.

A memory-safe programming language enforces measures to prevent memory misuse instead of relying on developers to add proper checks in their code. These measures range from the most conventional, such as bounds checking, to more sophisticated ones, such as variable ownership.

Memory-safe languages help protect against these bugs and manage memory automatically rather than relying on programmer-provided checks, thus mitigating most memory safety issues. However, they differ in the level of protection, mechanisms, and support tools.

Ada and SPARK are strongly typed languages that provide memory safety through language features, run-time checks, and support for static and dynamic analysis tools.

Ada is a safe programming language widely used for developing safety-critical applications. It enforces memory safety through language constructs that entail extensive run-time and compile-time checks. Strong typing, formal parameter modes, protected objects, and safe pointers are among those constructs.

The built-in checks prevent errors, including buffer overflow and out-of-bounds read/write. Strong typing and parameter modes prevent injecting wrong data that modifies memory or possibly alters control flow. Protected objects ensure that accessing shared resources is safe and free of race conditions. Pointers, the leading cause of many memory bugs in other languages, are safer in Ada by provisioning safe accessibility rules and null exclusion, which prevents null pointer dereferencing. Some features provide similar functionality to pointers but without the overhead and potential memory safety issues, so pointers do not need to be used.

Moreover, Ada's memory safety is backed by dynamic and static analysis tools that detect errors that are often difficult to track down during runtime and compilation.

Drawing on its roots in Ada, the SPARK language is listed as a memory-safe language by NIST. It supports Ada’s applicable memory safety features; a difference is that in SPARK, all checks are statically proven, whereas in Ada, many are enforced at run time. In addition, SPARK includes a safe pointer facility based on an ownership mechanism.