LDRA – A TASKING Company – has received a VDC Research Embeddy Award at Embedded World North America 2025 in recognition of its expanded security analysis, verification, and reporting capabilities for airborne software. The award highlights LDRA’s leadership in integrating safety and cybersecurity verification to support compliance with DO-326B & DO-356A up to Security Assurance Level (SAL) 3, and DO-178C up to Design Assurance Level (DAL) A.
The Embeddy Awards are presented at the Embedded World conferences to recognise standout innovations in embedded software and hardware technologies. Judged by a panel of industry experts, the awards highlight products that make a meaningful contribution to improving development efficiency, strengthening system robustness, or addressing emerging engineering challenges. LDRA’s recognition reflects the growing importance of integrating cybersecurity into the software assurance processes used across the aerospace sector.
Modern airborne systems are no longer isolated computing environments. From maintenance data exchanges and mission-system connectivity to passenger networks and operator services, today’s aircraft interact continuously with external systems. This connectivity brings operational advantages, but it also exposes attack surfaces that were previously protected through isolation – and ultimately, vulnerable software in safety critical applications represents a safety risk. These potential attack surfaces therefore create a need for structured assessment, mitigation, and verification of cybersecurity risks as part of airworthiness.
The first editions of DO-326 and DO-356 were introduced in recognition of this emerging need in 2014, and their latest iterations build on that foundation by providing clearer guidance, stronger assurance objectives, and closer alignment with established software-safety processes.
Aviation certification standards hierarchy showing relationships between airborne software guidelines and related standards for aircraft systems development
DO-326B defines the processes and activities required to identify and mitigate cybersecurity vulnerabilities, while DO-356A provides the associated guidance and objectives for each Security Assurance Level (SAL). Together they form the foundation of the Aerospace Security Framework, shaping how developers approach security throughout the lifecycle of an airborne system.
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) platforms serve as special-case examples of this convergence between safety and cybersecurity. As they platforms increasingly rely on autonomous functions, remote operations, and digital communication links, the boundaries between safety and security continue to converge. A security flaw may manifest as a safety event, and a safety limitation may create opportunities for exploitation.
Despite their ever heightening relevance, DO-326B and DO-356A do not define how to develop or verify airborne software in detail. Instead, they provide a security layer that must be integrated into the broader certification activities, as defined by DO-178C and associated guidance documents.
The newly expanded LDRA Productivity Package for Aerospace & Defense mirrors that structure by allowing developers to address functional safety and cybersecurity in parallel rather than as separate activities. This avoids duplicated effort, reduces programme costs, and supports the growing regulatory expectation that safety and security be engineered together.
The enhanced capabilities include:
Taint analysis with the LDRA Productivity Package for Aerospace & Defense
By incorporating these capabilities directly into the existing verification environment used for DO-178C, LDRA enables developers to build cybersecurity assurance evidence alongside safety evidence, supporting compliance with DO-326B/356A up to SAL 3.
The regulatory landscape for airborne cybersecurity continues to mature, and the latest revisions of the airworthiness security standards – DO-326B and DO-356A – now provide the primary guidance for identifying threats, modelling vulnerabilities, defining mitigations, and verifying their effectiveness across Security Assurance Levels. These updated documents clarify expectations around dataflow analysis, threat assessment, and cross-discipline integration with safety and software engineering activities.
LDRA’s expanded Productivity Package for Aerospace & Defense supports this newer framework directly, enabling developers to build the evidence required for compliance with DO-326B & 356A while maintaining the high-integrity verification processes associated with DO-178C. By integrating these activities within a unified environment, LDRA helps organisations apply the updated standards efficiently and consistently across their airborne programmes.
The Embeddy Award not only acknowledges LDRA’s technology but also reflects its ongoing commitment to helping the aerospace sector respond to evolving certification expectations. For more than fifty years, LDRA has supported safety-critical markets with automated verification and standards compliance tooling. Now, with extended cybersecurity capabilities and the support of TASKING, the LDRA Productivity Package for Aerospace & Defense is well positioned to help organisations navigate the increasingly interconnected future of airborne systems.
By providing a unified environment that reduces cost, risk, and time-to-market, these expanded security capabilities support the industry’s transition towards integrated safety and cybersecurity assurance. The Embeddy Award is a timely recognition of LDRA’s contribution to building safer and more secure airborne systems in an era defined by connectivity and complexity.
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