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Green Hills Software Joins FACE Consortium
Goals of FACE Consortium Aligned with Major Green Hills Certification Accomplishments
SANTA BARBARA, CA – September 7, 2010 —Green Hills Software, Inc., the largest independent vendor of embedded software solutions, today announced its membership in the Open Group FACE Consortium. FACE, or Future Airborne Capability Environment, is a consortium of government, DoD prime contractors, and industry commercial off-the-shelf vendors focused on defining new common business practices that will facilitate rapid insertion capabilities in the area of Operational Flight Programs (OFPs).
Bob Matthews, deputy capability lead, PMA-209 Missions Systems, U.S. Navy states, “The success of the FACE initiative depends on government, industry primes and commercial hardware and software suppliers, all working in sync to develop and deploy the technical standards and business processes required to achieve our objectives. Many of these objectives include the need to deploy new software applications in a safe and secure software certified environment.”
“Green Hills Software’s experience and lessons learned in delivering high-robust separation kernel technology through our prime contracting community and ultimately the certification and accreditation bodies are key to our success,” commented John Warther, vice president of government programs for Green Hills Software. “Any reduction in development and integration time for insertion of new OFPs has tremendous benefits to the Warfighter and significant impact on cost. Leveraging the common capabilities developed for one platform and transitioned or hosted on another platform has the potential to radically improve the concept of operations for the Warfighter. Imagine a legacy aircraft having the ability to conduct new missions because it now supports weather data, or situational awareness.”
FACE provides the ability to mix, match and load applications on an ad hoc basis where dedicated hardware once dominated. Currently, many dependencies between hardware and software exist for an existing capability on an existing platform. To the degree we can reduce these dependencies by creating a standards-based, flight-certified OFP repository, the services will be able to deliver the Warfighter better capability without compromising the safety and security they have come to expect.
In alignment with the FACE Consortium goals, Green Hills Software has delivered at the highest level on several fronts: investment in the DO-178B certification through the completion and delivery of fifty-three DO-178B safety certifications since 2002, and our successful completion and delivery of seven security certifications to Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level EAL6+, High Robustness with the NSA and NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership). The EAL6+ certification is the first of its kind, the highest Common Criteria security level ever achieved for an operating system. Only an EAL6+, High Robustness operating system is certified to protect classified information and other high value resources at risk of attack from sophisticated and well-funded attackers.
FACE objectives include leveraging Open APIs as well as identifying test suites that can measure conformance to these standards. Green Hills Software’s experience in supporting these goals dates back to 2003. Green Hills was the first COTS operating system company to achieve POSIX conformance in 2004 and is still the only conformant vendor to the 2003 POSIX profile test suite for the 2003 POSIX.1 System Interfaces Specification (IEEE standard 1003.1).
FACE also represents the first concerted industry effort requiring a marketplace for multiple levels of security (MLS) systems based on a MILS foundation. "This demand will drive innovative, new classes of applications, never before possible, on Operational Flight Programs, particularly in clean slate environments whereby new electronic hardware that supports partitioning through the use of the MMU (memory management unit)," continues Warther. "Today, we still see many platforms with 16-bit, non-MMU-based hardware based on chips like the 1750A."
Under the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009, Title II, Section 202 (B), the use of modular open architectures to enable competition for upgrades provides the impetus and enforcement mechanism that will continue to drive the acquisition community towards directed, verifiable and open standards.
About FACE
The FACE Consortium, an aviation-focused professional group made up of industry suppliers, customers and users, will create a technologically appropriate open FACE architecture, standards and business model that will result in:
- Standardized approaches & process models within avionics systems
- Lower implementation costs of FACE systems
- Standards that support a robust architecture and quality software
- Defined interoperability within FACE systems and components
- Portability of applications across multiple FACE systems and vendors
- Procurement of FACE conformant products
- More capabilities reaching the Warfighter faster
About Green Hills Software
Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software, Inc. is the largest independent vendor of embedded development solutions. In 2008, the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178B RTOS was the first and only operating system to be certified by the NSA to EAL6+ High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved for any software product. Our open architecture integrated development solutions address deeply embedded, absolute security and high-reliability applications for the military/avionics, medical, industrial, automotive, networking, consumer and other markets that demand industry-certified solutions. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. Visit Green Hills Software at www.ghs.com.
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