Code Analysis for Software and System Security Using Open Source Tools

Abstract

ABSTRACT Software security helps in identifying and managing risks. One of the effective ways to identify software vulnerabilities is to analyze its code. Code analysis (Chess & West, 2007) helps in catching common coding mistakes such as buffer overflow, unused variables, memory leaks, and various race conditions, which in turn optimizes computer programs, both in storage and computation aspects. Software developers use either open source tools or commercial tools for verification and validation of software. Without proper validation of a software/system using some standard guidelines, potential attackers can find ways to exploit vulnerabilities and bugs and then can gain control over a system, if they are successful. In this paper, we discuss some of the open source static code analysis and dynamic analysis tools, their merits, and limitations with respect to some target codes that contain possible threats. We consider C/C++ and Java programming languages for our experiments. For static code analyzers, we consider Flawfinder, Splint, and Cppcheck; PMD, Findbugs, and Valgrind for dynamic code analysis, and its plug-in, Memcheck, to perform dynamic analysis on executables. We provide our observations in a comparison table, highlighting these tools strengths and weaknesses.