RATS - Rough Auditing Tool for Security

This is RATS, a rough auditing tool for security, developed by Secure Software Inc. It is a tool for scanning C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby source code and flagging common security related programming errors such as buffer overflows and TOCTOU (Time Of Check, Time Of Use) race conditions. As its name implies, the tool performs only a rough analysis of source code. It will not find every error and will also find things that are not errors. Manual inspection of your code is still necessary, but greatly aided with this tool.

RATS is free software. You may copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the GNU Public License as contained in the file named COPYING that has been included with this distribution.

Requirements

RATS requires expat to be installed in order to build and run. Expat is often installed in /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/include. On some systems, you will need to specify --with-expat-lib and --with-expat-include options to configure so that it can find your installation of the library and header.

Expat can be found at: http://expat.sourceforge.net/

Installation

Building and installation of RATS is simple. To build, you simply need to run the configuration shell script in the distribution's top-level directory:

    ./configure

The configuration script is a standard autoconf generation configuration script and accepts many options. Run configure with the --help option to see what options are available.

Once the configuration script has completed successfully, simply run make in the distribution's top-level directory to build the program:

    make

By default, RATS will be installed to /usr/local/bin and its vulnerability database will be installed to /usr/local/lib. You may change the installation directories of both with the --prefix option to configure. You may optionally use the --bindir and --datadir to specify more precise locations for the files that are installed.

To install after building, simply run make with the install target:

    make install

This will copy the built binary, rats, to the binary installation directory and the vulnerability database, rats.xml, to the data installation directory.

Running RATS

Once you have built and installed RATS, it's time to start auditing your software! RATS accepts a few command line options that will be described here and accepts a list of files to audit on the command line. If no files to audit are specified, stdin will be used.

usage: rats [options] [file]...

Options explained: -d , --db , --database Specifies a vulnerability database to be loaded. You may have multiple -d options and each database specified will be loaded. -h, --help Displays a brief usage summary -i, --input Causes a list of function calls that were used which accept external input to be produced at the end of the vulnerability report. -l , --language Force the specified language to be used regardless of filename extension. Currently valid language names are "c", "perl", "php", "python" and "ruby". -r, --references Causes references to vulnerable function calls that are not being used as calls themselves to be reported. -w , --warning Sets the warning level. Valid levels are 1, 2 or 3.
Warning level 1 includes only default and high severity Level 2 includes medium severity. Level 2 is the default warning level 3 includes low severity vulnerabilities. -x Causes the default vulnerability databases (which are in the installation data directory, /usr/local/lib by default) to not be loaded. -R, --no-recursion Disable recursion into subdirectories. --xml Cause output to be in XML --html Cause output to be in HTML --follow-symlinks Evaluate and follow symlinks.

When started, RATS will scan each file specified on the command line and produce a report when scanning is complete. What vulnerabilities are reported in the final report depend on the data contained in the vulnerability database or databases that are used and the warning level in use.

For each vulnerability, the list of files and line numbers where it occured is given, followed by a brief description of the vulnerability and suggested action.

Contact

RATS is authored, maintained and distributed by Secure Software, Inc. All bug reports, patches, database contributions, comments, etc. should be sent to rats@securesoftware.com. Our website is http://www.securesoftware.com/

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Mike Ellison for providing the legwork on the initial port of rats-1.3 to the Win32 platform.

Special thanks to Ben Laurie for many significant contributions, including the OpenSSL-specific portions of the database.

Thanks to Adam Lazur for originally authoring the man page