Green Hills Platform for Secure Networking

» Download Secure Networking Platform Datasheet (PDF)
Security: the new key to high availability
  Secure Networking, MILS, IEC 61508, SSH, SSL, IPSec, IKE, RADIUS, SCA, software component architecture, POSIX.1, Securing data transmission, IPv6 support
 
Network equipment manufacturers have always been focused on producing systems with high availability—achieving five and six 9s of uptime has always been the goal. To achieve this, quality standards and advanced tools were developed to find and remove bugs early in the development cycle. Redundancy strategies were also developed to isolate faults and to enable fast recovery when faults occured in fielded systems.

While minimizing bugs and supporting redundancy are still key to ensuring highly available systems, attacks by hackers have emerged as a new threat to network uptime. Time and time again in recent years, security vulnerabilities in network equipment have been exploited to wreak havoc on networks or steal services. As VoIP and IPTV become commonplace—and the threat of losing revenue grows—it becomes even more critical that network service providers choose equipment hardened against attacks.

The Green Hills Platform for Secure Networking combats these vulnerabilities directly by:

  • Supporting security protocols for data transmission
  • Securing the network device itself
Other Benefits
» INTEGRITY Real Time Operating System
Our INTEGRITY real time operating system is ideal for telecommunications and networking products. INTEGRITY is the most reliable real time operating system. INTEGRITY is also small, fast, and easy to use. And no matter how many units you produce the price is always the same.
» Network and Telephony Software Packages
We offer a complete array of network (TCP/IP, PPP, FTP, TELNET, DHCP, SNMP, DNS, POP3, etc.) and telephony (ATM, SS7, Frame Relay, ISDN, etc.) protocol packages.
» C & C++ Development Environment
Our MULTI development environment provides everything that you need to develop telecommunications and networking software in the C & C++ programming languages.
» POSIX API
If your software has been written to use the POSIX API, you can use our POSIX API layer to run POSIX compliant software on our INTEGRITY Real Time Operating Systems.

» Application Porting Service
If you are currently using another real time operating system and you believe that it is too costly, time consuming, or high risk to port your application to the higher reliability, higher performance, more productive, royalty-free INTEGRITY real time operating system, then you need our Application Porting Service. It will deliver a fixed-price fixed-schedule risk-free turnkey conversion of your entire system to our INTEGRITY real time operating system.
» Reduce Your Time To Market
The fierce competition in the telecommunications and networking industry makes being the first to market with new technology critical to success. We offer a comprehensive range of products and services that reduce your time to market.
» Reduce Your Development Cost
The escalating cost of developing complex telecommunications and networking products makes reducing your development costs essential to your success. We offer a comprehensive range of products and services that reduce your development cost.
» Maximize Your Product Reliability
Reliability is critical for telecommunications and networking products. We offer a comprehensive range of products and services that maximize the reliability of your product.
» Maximize Your Product Performance
The competition for rapidly increasing telecommunications and networking product performance is fierce. We offer a comprehensive range of products and services that maximize the performance of your product.
» Maximize Your Product Capability
The competition for rapidly increasing telecommunications and networking product capability is intense. We offer a comprehensive range of products and services that boost the capability of your product.
» Maximize Your Product's Lifetime In The Market
The high cost of developing complex telecommunications and networking products makes extending your product's lifetime in the market essential to its financial success. We offer a comprehensive range of products and services that extend your product's lifetime in the market.

Securing data transmission
Secure Networking, MILS, IEC 61508, SSH, SSL, IPSec, IKE, RADIUS, SCA, software component architecture, POSIX.1, Securing data transmission, IPv6 support
A key part of the Platform for Secure Networks, the GHNet TCP/IP stack provides a comprehensive set of industry standard protocols in a high-performance, scalable stack.

The Platform for Secure Networks includes the GHNet TCP/IP network stack. GHNet is a dual mode IPv4/IPv6 stack that supports industry standard security protocols such as SSH, SSL, IPSec, IKE, RADIUS, and a complete set of cryptographic algorithms to support these protocols. The core product is 100% US-Citizen developed and free from foreign influence (FFFI). This is an important factor for certain government and military related networked devices (e.g., Type-1 NSA-approved crypto devices). GHNet is a high performance and extremely scalable stack that can be used in applications ranging from small footprint portable devices to core infrastructure equipment.

GHNet features:
  • Mature IPv6 support
  • Dual-mode stack
  • Extensive security protocol support
  • Core product is 100% US-Citizen developed
  • BSD 4.4 Socket API
  • Optimized for speed and size
  • Supports execution in a protected address spaces
  • Validated and tested with INTEGRITY

Network device security
  Secure Networking, IEC 61508, SSH, SSL, IPSec, IKE, RADIUS, SCA, software component architecture, POSIX.1, Securing data transmission, IPv6 support  
 



The unique architecture of the INTEGRITY RTOS is ideally suited for enabling security and high availability. Realizing that security isn’t something that can be bolted on to an existing product, INTEGRITY was designed with security in mind from the beginning. INTEGRITY supports the requirements and security policies of Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS), the architecture for composing secure computing systems from high-assurance components. The key concepts of MILS include:
  • Data isolation
  • Information flow control
  • Periods processing
  • Damage limitation
These key concepts enable protected execution of applications and system services, guaranteed resource allocation, information flow control between partitions, stack and application isolation, and containment of errors and attacks. All are essential components for hardening any device against attack.

While separation kernel technology is required as the foundation for building secure systems, it also has benefits related to high availability beyond security. The same fundamental principles that apply to isolating and containing an attack on the system can protect it from inadvertent programming errors. An error in one application in the system will not damage or disrupt any other services in the system. The fault is isolated and the damage is limited. Additionally, INTEGRITY’s message passing architecture and built in error handling provides a framework for notification and automatic recovery of a partition that has encountered a problem. These are key building blocks for building highly available systems.
CPU consolidation
Channel density is another driving force for equipment manufacturers. As processor speeds increase, manufactures want to squeeze more channels and data throughput into a single CPU. But this can result in sacrificing some of the hardware level redundancy.

By using separation kernel technology with guaranteed resource allocations, developers can create virtual processors executing on a single device. This enables them to retain the same redundancy architecture while consolidating software from multiple CPUs onto a single CPU.
Extensive partner ecosystem
The Platform for Secure Networking is integrated with a comprehensive suite of networking and applications protocols to address a wide variety of network equipment requirements.

  • Layer 3 IP routing protocols, MPLS, virtual routing, and virtual private networking
  • OSPF, BGP, IS-IS, DVMRP
  • PIM-SM, PIM-SSM, PIMDM, MSDP
  • MP-BGP for IPv6, IS-IS for IPv6, OSPFv3
  • VPN (layer 3 MPLS-BGP virtual private networking)
  • H.323, SIP, RTP/RTCP, MGCP, MEGACO/H.248, 3G-324M
  • Wireless LAN
  • Data Distribution Services—NDDS, CORBA
  • Advanced SNMP Agents
Integrated middleware
  Secure Networking, IEC 61508, SSH, SSL, IPSec, IKE, RADIUS, SCA, software component architecture, POSIX.1, Securing data transmission, IPv6 support
The Platform for Secure Networking is also integrated with the following optional middleware components.

USB
High-performance USB solutions provide both host and device (function) support and include numerous class drivers and example applications (source code provided for stacks and drivers).

File systems
INTEGRITY’s file system framework model, commonly referred to as a virtual file system (VFS) framework, is provided to make it easy to add and remove support for various file systems. The VFS server provides file system support for UNIX-like file systems, DOS/FAT 12/16/32, ISO 9660,Wear Leveling Flash File Systems, and others.

Embedded Databases
Support for several embedded in-memory databases allows users to store and access complex data content using structured store and query methods. The database solutions for INTEGRITY range from those with extremely small footprints, to distributed databases with real-time updates, to full blown SQL compliant databases.

Graphics and video support
INTEGRITY offers extensive support for embedded graphics development spanning the deeply embeddable to advanced OpenGL compatible 3D graphics environments.
Best in class tools
  Green Hills Software Secure Networking
The Platform for Secure Computing is integrated with the industry-leading MULTI® Integrated Development Environment (IDE). MULTI provides a complete suite of tools for eradicating bugs and producing the highest performance software.
  • Green Hills Compilers—independently certified as the industry’s best optimizing compilers
  • DoubleCheck static code analysis—finds bugs early in the development process, even before the code is loaded onto target hardware
  • Run Time Error Checking—finds bugs in real time without developer intervention
  • Memory profiling and leak detection—quickly identify difficult memory related bugs
  • TimeMachine—enables developers to catch all remaining bugs and debug them quickly
  • Path Analyzer—provides visualization of code execution and quickly identifies hot spots that require optimization.



Telelogic’s Rhapsody SysML/UML modeling & code generation

Telelogic’s Rhapsody Model-driven Development Environment based on SysML (System Modeling Language) and UML 2.0 (Unified Modeling Language) helps software teams move from requirements through system architecture phase with advanced modeling tools. Rhapsody is capable of fully modeling system architectures across any discipline and allows the execution, implementation and testing of those models in an easy push button environment. Tightly integrated with MULTI and INTEGRITY, Rhapsody can generate code for INTEGRITY-based systems from the models created with UML. Users can also debug Rhapsody models side-by-side with generated source code in MULTI.

Platform description

The Green Hills Platform for Secure Networking includes a royalty-free license for the following technologies:

  • INTEGRITY separation kernel
  • Advanced file system
    • Wear leveling flash support
    • Unix-like hierarchical file system (FFS)
    • RAM Disk
    • DOS/FAT12/16/32
    • ISO9660
    • NFS Client
  • GHNet dual mode IPv4/IPv6 networking stack
    • ARP, IP, UDP, TCP, ICMP, AutoIP, SLIP, DNS Client, DHCP Relay Agent, BootP Client, TFTP Client/Server, Telnet Server, FTP Client/Server, IP Multicast (IGMP), NAT Router, PPP, PPPoE, RIP Listener and MLD
  • IPSec
  • IKE
  • Secure Web Server including SSL/TLS Client and Server
  • Secure Shell Client and Server (SSH)
  • Radius Client
  • SNMP v1/2c/3

Optional products for this platform include:

  • Partitioning Journaling File System (PJFS)
  • WPA/WPA2 with Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) and Cisco compatible extensions
  • USB
  • Embedded Databases
  • Graphics/video support
  • Third party networking and application protocols

Summary
Green Hills secure networking success storiesThe next generation of network equipment must address security as a top priority along with high availability and reliability. Furthermore security and reliability are now inextricably intertwined. By its very nature, network equipment is connected and susceptible to attack.

Hackers are constantly finding new and inventive ways to disrupt and/or steal network services. A system cannot be highly available and reliable unless it is hardened against these attacks. Green Hills Software’s Platform for Secure Networking provides the foundation for building the next generation of security hardened network equipment.