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Source Code Analysis Tools: How to Choose and Use Them

Source code analysis (or static analysis) software helps keeps buggy code from seeing the light of day.

According to Kelley, organizations typically implement static analyzers at two stages of the development process: within the development environment, so developers can check their own code as they're writing, and within the code repository, so it can be analyzed at check-in time. The chief scientist uses this method. "In the first scan, if the engineer takes every finding and suppresses them, a milestone scan will catch those and generate a report," he says.

DO analyze pricing. Vendors have different pricing strategies, McDonald says. For instance, while all continuously add information to their libraries about the latest vulnerabilities, some charge extra for this, while others include it in the maintenance fee, he says. In addition, some vendors charge per seat, which can get expensive for large shops and may even seem wasteful for companies that don't intend to run the scanner every day, while others charge per enterprise license. Additionally, some vendors charge for additional languages, while others charge one price for any language they support, McDonald says.

DO plan to amend your processes. Tools are no replacement for strong processes that ensure application security from the beginning, starting with defining requirements, which should focus on security as much as functionality, according to Kelley. For instance, a tool won't tell you whether a piece of data should be encrypted to meet PCI compliance. "If a company just goes out and buys one of these tools and continues to do everything else the same, they won't get to the next level," she says.

The chief scientist says it's also important to determine what will happen when vulnerabilities are found, especially because the tools can generate thousands of findings. "Does the workflow allow them to effectively analyze, triage, prioritize or dispose of the findings?" he says. He is working with Ounce to integrate the system better with his current bug-tracking system, which is Quality Center. "It would be great to right-click on the finding to automatically inject it into the bug-tracking system," he says.

At NetApp, Park has reworked existing processes to ensure developers fix flagged vulnerabilities. As part of doing a code submit, developers do a test build, which must succeed or it can't be checked in. Then, when they check in code, an automated process starts an incremental build. If that build fails, a bug report is filed, complete with the names of developers who checked in code before the last build. "Developers are trained to treat a build failure as something they have to look at now,'" Park says.