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Secure Coding Analysis of an AADL Code Generator's Runtime System

White Paper
This paper describes a secure coding analysis of the PolyORB-HI-C runtime system used by C language code output from the Ocarina AADL code generator.
Publisher

Software Engineering Institute

Abstract

Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) is a foundation for creating model-based reliable systems. Its roots are in the safety community, specifically transportation engineering. The conditions for assuring safety and security often overlap, but they are not identical. As part of an investigation into using AADL for security applications, this paper describes a secure coding analysis of the PolyORB-HI-C runtime system used by C language code output from the Ocarina AADL code generator. The overall quality of the code is found to be high. However, several potential out-of-bounds stores were discovered, which opens up the possibility of buffer overflow attacks. The techniques for finding these