Re: Your opinion on a valuable and feasible goal for a new source code auditing tool

On Tue, 11 May 2004 08:51:52 +0200, Holger Peine said:

> Buffer overflow detection in C programs is the first thing that
> comes to mind, but there are already various efforts in this
> direction (source code scanners and other things like compiler
> support).   Another idea we have come up with is building an input 
> validation checker similar to Perl's taint mode other languages 
> (most probably Java, C++, or C). Do you think that taint checking
> would cover a noteworthy share of _pratical_ software security bugs?
> Or what else would you suggest instead?
> 
> We are aware of tools like flawfinder, ITS4, RATS, MOPS, Splint.

Linus Torvalds has a tool called 'sparse' that has already caught a number of
things in the Linux kernel code.  He however freely admits it's not a fully
completed tool - you might want to touch base with him and see if improving
that tool would be a worthwhile project....

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