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Awas: AADL information flow and error propagation analysis framework

  • S.I. : DETECT 2020
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Abstract

The continued maturation of industry standard architecture description languages is providing a foundation for more sophisticated analyses earlier in the system engineering process. The Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) and its supporting annotation sub-languages provide the ability to model system hardware/software components as well as information flows within the system. Such flows include conventional notions of data/control flows, security-oriented information flows, and fault/error propagation paths supported by the AADL Error Modeling Annex (EMv2)—all of which are central to engineering safety/security-critical systems. In this paper, we describe Awas-an open-source framework for reachability analysis on AADL models annotated with flow annotations at varying degrees of detail. The framework provides highly scalable interactive flow visualizations with dynamic querying capabilities. To assist the user, we provide a simple domain-specific language to check safety and security properties. To evaluate Awas, we apply it to a collection of industrial models of safety/security-critical systems from the medical and avionics domains.

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Notes

  1. Awas means “caution” in Indonesian.

  2. The simple UAS is adapted from an example used by the Collins Aerospace team on DARPA Cyber-Assured Systems Engineering (CASE) project—the authors are part of the Collins team on DARPA CASE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA

    Hariharan Thiagarajan, John Hatcliff &  Robby

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  1. Hariharan Thiagarajan
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  2. John Hatcliff
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Correspondence to Hariharan Thiagarajan.

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This work is supported in part by the US Army, by the DARPA CASE program, and by Software Engineering Institute.

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Thiagarajan, H., Hatcliff, J. & Robby Awas: AADL information flow and error propagation analysis framework. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 18, 485–504 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-021-00410-w

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