Certifying Auto-Generated Flight Code

Abstract

Model-based design and automated code generation are being used increasingly at NASA. Many NASA projects now use MathWorks Simulink and Real-Time Workshop for at least some of their modeling and code development. However, there are substantial obstacles to more widespread adoption of code generators in safety-critical domains. Since code generators are typically not qualified, there is no guarantee that their output is correct, and consequently the generated code still needs to be fully tested and certified. Moreover, the regeneration of code can require complete recertification, which offsets many of the advantages of using a generator. Indeed, manual review of autocode can be more challenging than for hand-written code. Since the direct V&V of code generators is too laborious and complicated due to their complex (and often proprietary) nature, we have developed a generator plug-in to support the certification of the auto-generated code. Specifically, the AutoCert tool supports certification by formally verifying that the generated code is free of different safety violations, by constructing an independently verifiable certificate, and by explaining its analysis in a textual form suitable for code reviews. The generated documentation also contains substantial tracing information, allowing users to trace between model, code, documentation, and V&V artifacts. This enables missions to obtain assurance about the safety and reliability of the code without excessive manual V&V effort and, as a consequence, eases the acceptance of code generators in safety-critical contexts. The generation of explicit certificates and textual reports is particularly well-suited to supporting independent V&V. The primary contribution of this approach is the combination of human-friendly documentation with formal analysis. The key technical idea is to exploit the idiomatic nature of auto-generated code in order to automatically infer logical annotations. The annotation inference algorithm itself is generic, and parametrized with respect to a library of coding patterns that depend on the safety policies and the code generator. The patterns characterize the notions of definitions and uses that are specific to the given safety property. For example, for initialization safety, definitions correspond to variable initializations while uses are statements which read a variable, whereas for array bounds safety, definitions are the array declarations, while uses are statements which access an array variable. The inferred annotations are thus highly dependent on the actual program and the properties being proven. The annotations, themselves, need not be trusted, but are crucial to obtain the automatic formal verification of the safety properties without requiring access to the internals of the code generator. The approach has been applied to both in-house and commercial code generators, but is independent of the particular generator used. It is currently being adapted to flight code generated using MathWorks Real-Time Workshop, an automatic code generator that translates from Simulink/Stateflow models into embedded C code.