WEBINAR ON-DEMAND
How domain separation and safe, secure coding techniques provide mutually supportive defence-in-depth

Developing compliant software is an expensive business. Whatever the standard – perhaps DO-178C (civil aviation), the EN 5012X series (Guided Transport), or the more general IEC 61508 - the more critical the code, the bigger the overhead. Small wonder that practitioners look to partition their code bases to minimise the size of the most critical elements.

Some functional safety standards such as ISO 26262 (automotive) and IEC 62304 (medical devices) even formally describe ASIL and Class decomposition processes respectively to encourage that practice. Such an approach also lends itself to the application of the principle of least privilege, with its inherent security benefits.

So far, so good. But the inevitable result of such a strategy is a collection of processes of varying criticality, with each having a requirement for Inter-Process Communication (IPC) in order for the system as a whole to function. If the integrity of the classes and integrity levels of each of these processes is to be maintained, it is imperative that there is no unwanted interference between them.

This webinar will explore the benefits of a software based Safety Checker, designed to automatically detect and hence help prevent interference between software elements of different criticality - without resorting to expensive, hardware-dependent virtualisation techniques. It will then examine the development of application code in the context of pertinent functional safety requirements. Finally, it will pay special attention to code handling data processed by IPCs, and the key role it has to play in defending a potential weakness in a decomposed architecture.

Speakers - 

Bharath Koppa is an Electrical Engineer with over 11 years of experience in developing and testing automotive embedded software. He began his career with Bosch, India. After graduating from FH Rosenheim Germany, he developed and tested embedded software on Infineon microcontrollers for BMW powertrain ECUs and was responsible for AUTOSAR MCAL software support and marketing at Renesas Electronics Europe.

Currently Bharath is working as a Technical Sales Engineer at TASKING and supports a wide range of customers in Europe. He is interested in multi-core embedded software development with a focus on safety, security and qualification aspects.

Mark Richardson has over 30 years’ experience in the development of real-time embedded software in C, C++ and Java on a variety of projects. He is a Lead Field Application Engineer with LDRA, where he works in close collaboration their numerous distributors.  Prior to joining LDRA, Mark was the Lead Application Engineer for IBM Rational Rhapsody, and has over 12 years of experience using UML on embedded projects.

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