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david-a-wheeler / flawfinder

a static analysis tool for finding vulnerabilities in C/C++ source code
GNU General Public License v2.0
491 stars 82 forks source link

Consider rewriting this to use joern or alternative #56

Open prabhu opened 3 years ago

prabhu commented 3 years ago

Hi,

This is a nice little project. However, as you might know, regexes are not that great for finding flaws. Would you consider rewriting this tool to use a data-flow analysis platform like Joern? Joern is also open-source. Below is a link to the query database which should give an idea.

https://queries.joern.io

Thanks in advance.

david-a-wheeler commented 3 years ago

I'm quite familiar with data-flow, control flow, etc. Doing that would be essentially a rewrite from scratch. If we were going to do data-flow, we'd also want control flow, type information, etc.

I don't see any advantage to modifying flawfinder to do this vs. starting a completely new project. In fact, it'd be easier to start from scratch.

Also, note that Flawfinder can work on partial code, including some code that won't compile and/or link. Flawfinder also doesn't require any dependencies (other than Python itself).

So I'd love to see such tools (there are already some!). But that seems like a separate project.