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Category Archives: Testing
goto fail and embedded C Compilers
Niall Cooling
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Function Parameters and Arguments on 32-bit ARM - January 7, 2016
- My Top 5 Podcasts - December 23, 2015
- Vulnerabilities in C : When integers go bad! - October 23, 2014
I can’t imagine anyone reading this posting hasn’t already read about the Apple “goto fail” bug in SSL. My reaction was one of incredulity; I really couldn’t believe this code could have got into the wild on so many levels.
First we’ve got to consider the testing (or lack thereof) for this codebase. The side effect of the bug was that all SSL certificates passed, even malformed ones. This implies positive testing (i.e. we can demonstrate it works), but no negative testing […]
Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, Industry Analysis, Testing
Tagged C Programming, goto fail, MISRA-C, quality, Static Analysis, Testing
5 Comments
Test Driven Development (TDD) with the mbed
Niall Cooling
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Function Parameters and Arguments on 32-bit ARM - January 7, 2016
- My Top 5 Podcasts - December 23, 2015
- Vulnerabilities in C : When integers go bad! - October 23, 2014
One of the most useful fallout’s from the acceptance of Agile techniques is the use of Test-Driven-Development (TDD) and the growth of associated test frameworks, such as GoogleTest and CppUTest, etc.
I won’t get into the details of TDD here as they are well covered elsewhere (I recommend James Grenning’s book “Test Driven Development for Embedded C” for a good coverage of the subject area), but the principle is
Write a test
Develop enough code to compile and build (but will fail the test)
Write the application code […]
Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex, Testing
4 Comments
Setting up the Cortex-M3/4 (ARMv7-M) Memory Protection Unit (MPU)
Niall Cooling
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Function Parameters and Arguments on 32-bit ARM - January 7, 2016
- My Top 5 Podcasts - December 23, 2015
- Vulnerabilities in C : When integers go bad! - October 23, 2014
An optional part of the ARMv7-M architecture is the support of a Memory Protection Unit (MPU). This is a fairly simplistic device (compared to a fully blow Memory Management Unit (MMU) as found on the Cortex-A family), but if available can be programmed to help capture illegal or dangerous memory accesses.
When first looking at programming the MPU it may seem rather daunting, but in reality it is very straightforward. The added benefit of the ARMv7-M family is the well-defined memory […]
Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex, Testing
Tagged C Declarations, CMSIS, LPC1768, MPU
3 Comments
I Dream of a Cheeky Missile Launcher
Latest posts by admin (see all)
- On BashLite and Shellshock - November 19, 2014
- Acorn Goes to Market with RISC Microprocessor - November 6, 2014
- Static and Dynamic Libraries on Linux - April 4, 2014
I read a blog post by Matthias Vallentin a while back about getting a USB missile launcher working and thought that a similar gadget would be a nice candidate for the 2012 refresh of our successful EL503 Developing for Embedded Linux course so ordered a nice looking piece of hardware from Amazon – the Thunder Missile Launcher from Dream Cheeky.
Sadly these guys don’t provide Linux drivers and the hardware wasn’t an exact match for the launcher used in Matthias’ article […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, General, Testing, training
Tagged kernel driver, launcher, linux, USB
2 Comments
Capturing the Stripe-d Flag 2.0 – The After Party
Latest posts by admin (see all)
- On BashLite and Shellshock - November 19, 2014
- Acorn Goes to Market with RISC Microprocessor - November 6, 2014
- Static and Dynamic Libraries on Linux - April 4, 2014
Following on from our previous article looking at Stripe’s Capture the Flag 2.0 challenge, Team Feabhas cracked the last of the levels and its members should hopefully be receiving their complementary t-shirts soon.
It has proven to be a popular article with lots of people coming to the blog for solutions and walk-through, and now that the competition has finished we have decided to share the way we approached each of these levels, their solution and the way in which the […]
Posted in Design Issues, General, Testing
Tagged linux, walkthrough, web security. strip ctf
2 Comments
Setting up googlemock with Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition
Niall Cooling
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Function Parameters and Arguments on 32-bit ARM - January 7, 2016
- My Top 5 Podcasts - December 23, 2015
- Vulnerabilities in C : When integers go bad! - October 23, 2014
Following on from my last post about setting up googletest to use with Visual Studio 2010 express edition, this post builds on that by showing how to build, setup and test the googlemock libraries.
If you have read the previous post, then the basic steps are very similar.
First, download the googlemock zip file and unzip it to known location. As before, I suggest something easy, either C:\gmock-1.6.0, or as in my case C:\src\gmock-1.6.0. One useful fact is that all the gtest […]
Setting up googletest with Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition
Niall Cooling
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Function Parameters and Arguments on 32-bit ARM - January 7, 2016
- My Top 5 Podcasts - December 23, 2015
- Vulnerabilities in C : When integers go bad! - October 23, 2014
So on an Embedded, Real-Time blog why am I taking about Visual C++ and googletest?
With the growth and acceptance of agile techniques, such as Test Driven Design (TDD), which is very well explained in James Grenning’s book Test Driven Development for Embedded C, we now have a set of tools and techniques that are:
Natural to use (as they use the native language)
Easy to use (to varying degrees)
Free
that allow the quality of embedded software to be significantly improved prior to target […]
Effective Testing: The “Swiss Cheese” model
Glennan Carnie
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Great Expectations - September 8, 2016
- The three ‘No’s of sequential consistency - August 11, 2016
- Memory consistency made simple(ish) - July 28, 2016
Why do we test?
Software development is a collaborative effort. You bring in input from customers, managers, developers, and QA and synthesize a result. You do this because mistakes in requirements or architecture are expensive, possibly leading to lost sales.
When we develop products we want them to be successful. We want our customers to buy, enjoy, and recommend our products or services. In other words, we want to build quality products. In this case, quality means four inter-related things:
Compliance quality– Can […]
Posted in Testing
Tagged black-box, quality, review, Static Analysis, Swiss Cheese, unit test, white-box
2 Comments
Importing IAR EW 5.4 Projects into Parasoft C++test
Niall Cooling
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Function Parameters and Arguments on 32-bit ARM - January 7, 2016
- My Top 5 Podcasts - December 23, 2015
- Vulnerabilities in C : When integers go bad! - October 23, 2014
Background
Recently I have been experimenting with Parasoft’s C++test tool for static analysis of C and C++ code. As part of this I went through the process of importing an existing C project developed in IAR’s Embedded Workbench toolset. Even though importing a project and checking it against MISRA-C isn’t too taxing, I though I would share my notes for doing