#static code analysis

IT conferences and meetings on programming languages see a growing number of speakers talking about static code analysis. Although this field is quite specific, there is still a number of interesting discussions to be found here to help programmers understand the methods, ways of use, and specifics of static code analysis. In this article, we have collected a number of videos on static analysis whose easy style of presentation makes them useful and interesting to a wide audience of both skilled and novice programmers.

What is Static Analysis?

Author: Matt Might

Static analyzers allow programmers to bound and predict the behavior of software without running it. Once used exclusively for program optimization, they have rapidly risen in prominence for areas like software security and automatic parallelization. The author takes you on a tour of the landscape of static analysis through the lens of abstract interpretation.

Static code analysis used for code clean up

Author: PVS-Studio team

The report gives information about ways to detect bugs, methodology of static analysis, correct and incorrect use of analysis tools. The author also provides myths about static analysis that may lead to erroneous understanding among the developers. The presentation shows errors in Open Source projects, detected by such tools as ReSharper, PVS-Studio, Visual Studio SCA.

Static Code Analysis: Scan All Your Code For Bugs

Author: Jared DeMott

The author discusses static code analysis and how it is used in bug elimination. The talk covers a discussion of pattern matching, procedural, data flow, and statistical analysis, and also includes examples of common software vulnerabilities such as memory corruption, buffer overflow and over reads, script injection, XSS and CSRF, command injection, and misconfigurations.

I am more than a little skeptical of this:

“Static analysis—a widely deployed form of automated security testing—is typically rule-based, meaning it matches code against known vulnerability patterns. That catches common issues, like exposed passwords or outdated encryption, but often misses more complex vulnerabilities, like flaws in business logic or broken access control. Rather than scanning for known patterns, Claude Code Security reads and reasons about your code the way a human security researcher would: understanding how components interact, tracing how data moves through your application, and catching complex vulnerabilities that rule-based tools miss.”

This is a bit of a misrepresentation. People have been looking for vulnerable code for a long time; both manually and with tools, and yet plenty of vulnerability’s get through anyways.

This idea that because it works more like a person or that it “reasons” smells off. LLMs don’t reason. So unless this product is not an LLM under the hood, it can’t reason either. LLMs have been shown to be not significantly better than a person at finding vulnerabilities. SAST tools have also been compared and found to have their niche.

“Our Frontier Red Team has been stress-testing these abilities systematically: entering Claude in competitive Capture-the-Flag events, partnering with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to experiment with using AI to defend critical infrastructure, and refining Claude’s ability to find and patch real vulnerabilities in code.”

This all sounds good in principle. However, what is this tool learning on? The corpus of human knowledge. I’m am not immediately sure of how a statistical pattern engine is going to become this panacea they seem to imply—especially if it works on theories principle of the most likely?

I feel that these claims stand in contrast to what actual developers are saying about being inundated with slop vulnerability reports. Maybe this does better, but more reports and LLM generated PRs isn’t what we need right now.

I am not saying that this tool might not be useful. However, I don’t think it’s revolutionary. Snyk has been using machine learning to detect vulnerabilities for many years before this LLM craze.

I think one of the biggest red flags is:

“Every finding goes through a multi-stage verification process before it reaches an analyst. Claude re-examines each result, attempting to prove or disprove its own findings and filter out false positives.”

This to me sounds like the tax auditor who audits their own taxes. I don’t immediately see how this is a good check or a good validation scheme.

I think that this article plays on perceptions. The perception is that current SAST doesn’t work well. However, it’s more a hard problem than bad. Is this tool a useful one? Maybe, but it’s useful as another tool in the arsenal.

Version management: GitLab 13.11 sends agents to the Kubernetes cluster

The company GitLab has released version 13.11 of the platform of the same name. Again, the largest additions can be found in the premium and ultimate commercial variants. The focus is on integration with Kubernetes and the implementation of compliance guidelines through appropriate pipelines. Users of the free versions will find, among other things, a dedicated admin mode and the integration of…

#Coding a #codeanalyzer with Yuri Minaev from #pvs-studio #completedevpod

Static code analysis automatically examines source code before it compiles or is run. It does this by comparing the code code to a set of rules or standards. This process allows for the automation of code reviews and can be used in conjunction with peer reviews. Yuri Minaev is C++ developer working for the PVS-Studio company as one of developers of the code analyzer for C++. His primary…