announcement

I've just released "flawfinder", a program that can scan source code
and identify out potential security flaws, ranking them by likely severity.
Unlike ITS4, flawfinder is completely open source / free software
(it's released under the GPL license).

Flawfinder will miss some security problems, and point out issues that aren't
really security problems, but nevertheless I think it can help track
down security problems in code so that the code can be fixed.

You can download flawfinder from:
  http://www.dwheeler.com/flawfinder

Flawfinder is in its very early stages - I'm labelling it version "0.12".
It works reliably, but its ruleset is currently small and rudimentary.
It can already find some security problems now, but expanding its ruleset
will give it much more power.  Also, it currently can only examine C/C++ code.

After I wrote flawfinder - and just before I released it - I found out that
Secure Software Solutions was also writing a program (RATS) to perform this
same task, also to be released under the GPL.  We agreed to release our
programs simultaneously, and to mention each other's programs in our
announcements.  Now that we've released our programs, we plan to coordinate
so that there will be a single open source / free software
source code scanner that will be a ``best of breed.''

--- David A. Wheeler
    dwheeler@dwheeler.com