2014-08-02 David A. Wheeler * Release version 1.31, a set of small improvements mostly CWE-related. * Note that flawfinder is officially CWE-compatible. * Support GNU make install conventions (prefix, bindir, DESTDIR, etc.). The older program-specific conventions are still supported, but the documentation emphasizes using the standard conventions instead. * Simplified installation text. * Added more wide character function rules. * Add reference to info at "http://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs". * Document that hitlists should be trusted to be loaded or diffed. These are implented using Python's pickle module, and that module presumes the data is from a trustworthy source. In the expected use case this is fine... but it needed to be documented. * Tweak/improve mappings to CWE. E.G., strlen() better maps to CWE-126 (buffer over-read). In a few cases the CWE mappings weren't reported as such; that is now fixed. CWEs are actually a hierarchy; expose a little of this so people can more easily search on them. * Add "-H" option as synonym for "--html". 2014-07-19 David A. Wheeler * Release 1.29, primarily for CWE improvements. * Multi-line formatting is faster and formats better. * Documentation about CWEs has been improved. * HTML format includes links from CWE identifiers to their definitions. * Tweak CWE mappings, e.g., strlen maps to CWE-126 (buffer over-read). * Option "--listrules" now gives default warning and is tab-delimited. * Regression test suite now also tests the generated HTML. 2014-07-13 David A. Wheeler * Release 1.28 * Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) references are now included in most hits * Handle files not ending in newline (thanks to Alexis Wilke) * Documentation clarifications * Added support for "git diff" in patchfile processing * Handles unbalanced double-quotes in sprintf * Fix incorrect time executed report * Fix bug to allow "flawfinder ." (fix bug#3) * Fix ignore directive when filenames differ (fix bug#6) 2007-01-16 David A. Wheeler * Release version 1.27 2007-01-16 Sebastien Tandel * Fix Debian bug #268236. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=268236 This complains that flawfinder crashes when presented with a file it cannot read. The patch obviously can't prevent the problem, since the tool can't review what it can't read, but at least it halts with a cleaner error message. 2007-01-15 cmorgan * Fixed Debian bug #271287 (flawfinder). See: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=271287 Fixed skipping newlines when line ended with \, which caused incorrect line number reporting. Skip multiple whitespace at one time. 2007-01-15 David A. Wheeler * Modified Sebastien Tandel's code so that it also supports GNU diff (his code worked only for svn diff) * When using a patchfile, skip analysis of any file not listed in the patchfile. 2007-01-15 Sebastien Tandel * By default, now skips directories beginning with "." (this makes it work nicely with many SCM systems). Added "--followdotdir" option if you WANT it to enter such directories. * Fixed divide-by-zero when no code found (not exactly common in normal use, but anyway!) 2004-06-15 David A. Wheeler * Released version 1.26. * NOTE: Due to an error on my part, the tar file for version 1.25 was for a short period (after 2004-06-05) actually version 1.26, incorrectly labelled as 1.25. My sincere apologies!! Please upgrade to 1.26, since that way you'll be SURE to get the right version. 2004-06-04 David A. Wheeler * Reviewed and modified Jared's code somewhat, and added support for _TEXT() as well as _T(). See http://www.rpi.edu/~pudeyo/articles/unicode.html for more info on Microsoft's approach to internationalization involving TCHAR. * Wrote ChangeLog entries for Jared's code. 2004-06-04 Jared Robinson (jarrob, at, symantec.com) * Added more support for Microsoft's approach to internationalization. Thus, it accepts _T() just like gettext(), and adds many more functions: _getts(), vswprintf(), _stprintf(), _vstprintf(), vwprintf(), vfwprintf(), _vtprintf(), _ftprintf(), _vftprintf(), _sntprintf(), _vsntprintf(), _ftscanf(), _gettc(). In this approach, TCHAR and various macros are typically used. In particular, _T() of tchar.h converts character strings to long character strings, if _UNICODE is defined (this makes TCHAR a long 16-bit character). Thus, T() is: #ifdef _UNICODE #define _T(x) L ## x #else #define _T(x) x #endif 2004-06-02 David A. Wheeler * Added two new rules for GLib functions, "g_get_home_dir" and "g_get_tmp_dir", per a suggestion by Steve Kemp, lead of the Debian Security Auditing Project. This closes the wishlist item in Debian bug report #250432 (see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=250432). Contributors - please email wishlist items to me; I can't monitor every distribution's local bug tracking system. PLEASE tell upstream developers when there's a bug/wishlist item, we can't fix it if we don't know. * Added curl_getenv(). Kemp's suggestion reminded me to search for other getenv()-like functions, and that one popped up. * Added several rules for input functions (for -I) - recv, recvfrom, recvmsg, fread, and readv. * Tightened the false positive test slightly; if a name is followed by = or - or + it's unlikely to be a function call, so it'll be quietly discarded. * Modified the summary report format slightly. * Modified the getpass text to remove an extraneous character, thanks to a bug report from Joerg Beyer (job, at, webde-ag.de) * Modified installation instructions to clarify how to set INSTALL_DIR at run-time so it installs elsewhere. It uses the standard GNU conventions, but not everyone knows about them. By default, it installs in /usr/local. Just use normal make overrides to change that, e.g., make INSTALL_DIR=/usr INSTALL_DIR_MAN=/usr/share/man install I do NOT use the ?= macro-setting commands in the makefile, because that's not standard (e.g., it's not in SUSv3), so while that would work in GNU make, it wouldn't work in others. 2004-05-31 David A. Wheeler * Released version 1.25. 2004-05-30 David A. Wheeler * Added more rules for finding problems by examining the Red Hat Linux 9 documentation (the man3 man pages), looking for phrases like "do not use", "security", and "obsolete". Thus, added rules for cuserid, getlogin, getpass, mkstemp, getpw, memalign, as well as the obsolete functions gsignal, ssignal, ulimit, usleep. * Modified text for strncat to clarify it. My thanks to Christian Biere, christianbiere, at, gmx.de, for reporting the problem. * Added lengthy text to the manual to explain exactly how to use flawfinder with vim and emacs. This should also help integrate flawfinder into other text editors/IDEs. * Fixed error in --columns format, so that the output is simply "filename:linenumber:columnnumber" when --columns (-C) is used. * Eliminated "Number of" phrase in the footer report (it was redundant anyway) * Added more statistical information to the footer report. * Changed makefile to simplify running tests. * Tests now autogenerate html and txt versions. * Added shortcut single-letter commands (-D for --dataonly, -Q for --quiet, -C for --columns), so that invoking from editors is easier. * Tries to autoremove some false positives. In particular, a function name followed immediately by "=" (ignoring whitespace) is automatically considered to be a variable and NOT a function, and thus doesn't register as a hit. There are exotic cases where this won't be correct, but they're pretty unlikely in real code. * Added a "--falsepositive" (-F) option, which tries to remove many more likely false positives. The current heuristic is: if -F is enabled, any function name must be followed by "(" (ignoring whitespace) to be considered a possible hit; otherwise, it's thrown away. Thus, if you often use variable names that are also the names of risky functions, like "access", you might consider using this option. Note that flawfinder uses simple lexical analysis; eliminating many more false positives would require deeper code analysis (to examine type information, buffer size declarations, etc.). This option also disables reporting of static character buffer arrays. This -F option and the autoremoving of false positives above is in response to a problem report from Mike Ruscher (Mike.Ruscher, at, cse-cst.gc.ca), though the approach and code is my own. This may not completely solve Mr. Ruscher's problem, but it's a start. * Documented that flawfinder output can be misunderstood if there are source filenames whose names contain newline, linefeed, or colon. Source filenames shouldn't have such characters anyway; while flawfinder can handle them, many other tools can't. * Modified the documentation to make it clear in the synopsis which one-letter flags are short for which long names. * Modified "make install" script slightly so that it creates directories that don't yet exist when installing. My thanks to Joerg Beyer (job, at webde-ag.de) for reporting the problem and suggesting a solution. This solution requires that "mkdir" support the "-p" option, which shouldn't be a problem for nearly all users. 2003-10-29 David A. Wheeler * Released version 1.24. * Fixed an incredibly obscure parsing error that caused some false positives. If a constant C string, after the closing double-quote, is followed by a \ and newline (instead of a comma), the string might not be recognized as a constant string (thus triggering warnings about non-constant values in some cases). This kind of formatting is quite ugly and rare. My thanks to Sascha Nitsch (sascha, at spsn.ath.cx) for pointing this bug out and giving me a test case to work with. * Added a warning for readlink. The implementation and warning are mine, but the idea of warning about readlink came from Stefan Kost (kost, at imn.htwk-leipzig.de). Thanks!! 2003-09-27 David A. Wheeler * Released version 1.23. Minor bugfixes. 2003-09-27 David A. Wheeler * Fixed subtle bug - in some circumstances single character constants wouldn't be parsed correctly. My thanks to Scott Renfro (scottdonotspam, at, renfro.org) for notifying me about this bug. Scott Renfro also sent me a patch; I didn't use it (the patch didn't handle other cases), but I'm grateful since it illustrated the problem. * Fixed documentation bug in man page. The option "--minlevel=X" must be preceded by two dashes, as are all GNU-style long options. The man page accidentally only had one dash in the summary (it was correct elsewhere); it now correctly shows both dashes. * Modified man page to list filename extensions that are interpreted as C/C++. * Removed index.html from distribution - it's really only for the website. 2003-03-08 David A. Wheeler * Released version 1.22. Output format slightly changed (colon added), so that it's compatible with tools that expect compiler warnings in the typical format "filename:line-number: warning". To get the fully expected format (all in one line), use "-S". Also, improved RPM packaging. 2003-03-08 David A. Wheeler * Changed makefile to be consistent with new RPM packaging approach. * Changed makefile: now for testing, will automatically uninstall old sloccount when creating rpm. Also (for me), make my_install works (well, it helps me anyway). 2003-02-01 Jose Pedro Oliveira * Improved RPM packaging. 2003-09-22 Jukka A. Ukkonen * Recommended an extra colon in the output format, so that the output format would like like typical compiler output (and thus more compatible with existing tools that report warnings). 2002-09-07 David A. Wheeler * Released version 1.21, with the following changes: * Improved the default output so it creates multiple formatted lines instead of single very long lines for each hit. Use the new "--singleline" (-S) option to get the original "long line" format. * Removed duplicate "getpass" entry in the ruleset; this didn't hurt anything, but was unnecessary. Thanks to the user who gave me that feedback, wish I'd kept your email address so I could credit you properly :-). * Added a short tutorial to man page. * Fixed initial upper/lower case on many entries in the ruleset. * Allow "--input" as a synonym for "--inputs". 2002-07-07 David A. Wheeler * Released version 1.20, with many more changes: * Entries have been added to the database to detect file openings and static character array definitions. * The HTML format has been significantly improved. * Joerg Beyer provided several nice improvements to flawfinder, including a timing report. * Now Flawfinder by default skips symbolic links, and always skips special files, to counter attackers who insert malicious files in their source code directories. * The documentation has been improved in various ways. 2002-07-05 David A. Wheeler * Completely rewrote the functions handling opening the files/directories named on the command line and when walking down the directory tree. This was in part to handle a new security requirement for source code web hosting services, which may analyze code written by someone else AND then send reports to someone else who doesn't have the same rights to view files as the analysis program. It's the last part that's different - the attacker may control the code being analyzed and insert non-regular files or symbolic links to "bad" files like /etc/passwd (to expose its contents) or /dev/zero (to stall analysis). These are annoying but not really a problem when the analyst is running on his OWN machine. To deal with this, now flawfinder NEVER opens a file type that isn't a file or directory, and it skips symbolic links by default (though this can be changed), no matter if they're listed at the top or inside a directory descendent. This is actually reasonable behavior for everyone, since others may be analyzing programs that they don't trust either. * Added open() and fopen() as entries, now it has 127 entries in the database. Modified test code to test it. * Warning messages about skipping symlinks and files that aren't regular files are now controlled by --quiet instead of --dataonly; since --quiet controls printing status messages this seems more reasonable. * Changed the format of the HTML output - now it creates a list. The ending is now in regular type, instead of 
...
. This seemed too look nicer. * Reworked Beyer's patch that prints speed somewhat, e.g., to print floating point time (on small programs or fast machines the time would be reported as "0") and to avoid divide-by-zero on systems where time really is reported as zero. * Added "--omittime", so that the regression test results won't vary depending on the time the analysis takes. * Fixed minor bug: now the filename "-" works to mean standard input. This is rarely used, since usually files are analyzed instead. * Modified documentation to make clear that in many circumstances you need to copy the source code to a separate area. I removed the reference to "--nolink", since this is now the default. * Modified makefile to generate correct-results.html and correct-results.txt, so that (1) there will be a standard to compare with and (2) the web page has a demo. 2002-07-05 Joerg Beyer * Tiny patch to report the number of lines analyzed and the analysis speed in lines/second. 2002-07-04 David A. Wheeler * Changed Joerg Beyer's patch that gives a nicer error message if an invalid option flag is given. Now the patch also works in Python 1.5. This involved using getopt.error instead of getopt.GetoptError. * Added a comment explicitly documenting that flawfinder is written to run under both Python 1.5 and Python 2. Lots of systems only include Python 1.5, or use Python 1.5 as the default Python (e.g., Red Hat 7.2). Someday that won't be a concern, but there's no reason it can't easily port between the two for a while. * Ran PyChecker and modified code to eliminate the errors it reports. 2002-07-03 David A. Wheeler * Changed the default to IGNORE symbolic links, and added the --allowlink option to use symbolic links. This is a safer default, and few people will really want to follow symbolic links anyway. * Added option --dataonly to suppress headers and footers; use this along with --quiet to get "just the facts" (e.g., when processing the output with other tools). This was inspired by a comment from A.T. Hofkamp. 2002-07-03 Joerg Beyer * Various small patches - thanks!! There were as follows: * If you call flawfinder without input, state that there was no input, not state that there's no hit. * If interrupted with Control-C, flawfinder now prints cleanly that it was interrupted. * Print a nicer error message if an invalid option flag is given. * Just for completeness' sake, I'm including two of the patches: --- flawfinder_orig Wed Jul 3 09:56:34 2002 +++ flawfinder Wed Jul 3 10:25:49 2002 @@ -1216,10 +1216,15 @@ if loadhitlist: f = open(loadhitlist) hitlist = pickle.load(f) else: - for f in sys.argv[1:]: + files = sys.argv[1:] + if not files: + print "*** no input files" + return None + for f in files: process_dir_or_file(f) + return 1 def show_final_results(): global hitlist count = 0 @@ -1275,11 +1280,14 @@ def flawfind(): process_options() display_header() initialize_ruleset() - process_files() - show_final_results() - save_if_desired() + if process_files(): + show_final_results() + save_if_desired() Detect control-C: --- flawfinder_orig Wed Jul 3 09:56:34 2002 +++ flawfinder Wed Jul 3 09:58:37 2002 @@ -1281,5 +1281,8 @@ save_if_desired() if __name__ == '__main__': - flawfind() + try: + flawfind() + except KeyboardInterrupt: + print "*** Flawfinder interrupted" --- flawfinder_orig Wed Jul 3 09:56:34 2002 +++ flawfinder Wed Jul 3 09:58:37 2002 @@ -1280,6 +1280,9 @@ show_final_results() save_if_desired() if __name__ == '__main__': - flawfind() + try: + flawfind() + except KeyboardInterrupt: + print "*** Flawfinder interrupted" 2002-07-02 David A. Wheeler * Added detection of static arrays of char, wchar_t, and TCHAR. * Fixed typo in makefile uninstall script. My thanks to Andrew Dalgleish for pointing this out. * Modified installation to be friendlier to Cygwin. My thanks to Andrew Dalgleish for pointing this out, too. One step involved creating PYTHONEXT in the makefile and documenting it, which was no problem. A more surprising problem was that the INSTALL file needed to be renamed to "INSTALL.txt", because otherwise "make install" thinks that everything is already installed. This is a nasty problem caused by Windows' type insensitivity conflicting with normal Unix standards... this should really be noted somewhere in various standard documents!! I eventually added a ".PHONY:" target to the makefile, which also solves the problem when using GNU make. * Fixed ChangeLog - the 2002 dates were accidentally 2001. 2002-07-02 David A. Wheeler * Changed correct-results so that the version numbers are right. * Created "make test-is-correct" which moves the test results into the "correct-results" file. 2002-07-02 David A. Wheeler * Released version 1.01. * Bugfix: Programs with getopt() or getopt_long() could trigger a problem with flawfinder itself. Now fixed. * Added the --nolink option, and a detailed description in the man page. Basically, this foils attacks where malicious programmers insert into their source tree symbolic links to files like /etc/passwd or /dev/zero. You still need to copy source code files into a separate area if you are worried about malicious programmers; see the new man page discussion about this. 2002-07-01 David A. Wheeler * Released version 1.00, a major step forward. * I have significantly enlarged the database, from 55 rules to 122 rules. Making the database this large is such a major improvement in its usefulness that I've bumped the version number up to 1.00. A number are from my book, while others are suggested by "Writing Secure Code" by Howard and LeBlanc (for the Windows-specific issues). * Added HTML generation support. * Significantly enlarged the test suite. 2002-5-6 David A. Wheeler * Released version 0.22, a very minor improvement. * Modified the report about %s in scanf when a limit for %s was provided; some found the error report very confusing. My thanks to Agustin.Lopez, who asked a question that led me to this understanding. 2001-12-18 David A. Wheeler * Released version 0.21. * Fixed an error in the database entry for syslog(3), which would cause incorrect hits. This resolves the Debian bug "Bug#124009: flawfinder: wrong reports of format fulnerabilities for syslog". * Added simple "INSTALL" file. * Fixed documentation, documenting --version and fixing a format problem with "--neverignore". * I accidentally wrote over version 0.20 with version 0.21's contents. Sigh. 2001-12-11 David A. Wheeler * Released version 0.20. * Added --version, which prints JUST the version number without actually analyzing any programs. 2001-11-08 David A. Wheeler * Fixed MANIFEST.in to include "flawfinder.1*"; that way the compressed man page is included when using MANIFEST.in. Thanks to Jon Nelson for noting this. The effect of this is quite tiny - my tar file & rpm files already included the compressed man page, so this error affects very few people. Note also that this just meant that only the uncompressed man page was in the MANIFEST, so I don't expect that this error had any user-visible effects other than a few more K of man page space (and with multi-Gigabyte drives, that's hard to notice). 2001-11-04 David A. Wheeler * Released version 0.19 * Fixed a minor bug - flawfinder didn't realize that multiline strings passed to gettext() are still constant strings. My thanks to "Arthur", who reported this bug, and Adam Lazur (Debian) who passed it on to me. This closes Debian Bug#118025. * Minor change - precomputed internationalization pattern for a minor performance improvement. * Output a reminder that not all hits are actually security vulnerabilities, as well as that there may be other vulnerabilities. The documentation mentioned this too, but including that in the output of the program makes it clearer (apparantly some expect flawfinder to perform amazing magic far beyond the possible). I think ALL programs like this should include this reminder; otherwise sane software developers somehow expect programs like this to work miracles, instead of simply reporting likely spots based on heuristics. 2001-11-03 David A. Wheeler * Added a "help" option and support for DistUtils, as well as modification of the RPM spec file so it can be built by non-root. My thanks to Jon Nelson for the patches to do this. * Added "syslog" to the vulnerability database. My thanks to Dave Aitel for this contribution. * Generate and install compressed man page, rather than uncompressed. My thanks to Marius Tomaschewski for this suggestion. 2001-10-29 David A. Wheeler * Released version 0.17. * Created an RPM package, to simplify installation. * Accepts RATS' "ignore" directive, as well as ITS4's, for compatibility's sake with RATS. * Trivial change: shortened processing status phrase to "Processing" so long filenames are more likely to fit on one line. * Modified the man page, in the hopes that the new one is even easier to understand. 2001-10-28 David A. Wheeler * Released version 0.16. * Added support for directories. If a directory (instead of a file) is given on the command line as something to examine, C/C++ files in that directory and its subdirectories (recursively) are examined. This should make it easy to analyze entire projects, and to make it easy to integrate flawfinder into project websites. * Added to the vulnerability database: randomizing functions & getenv. * Reports the number of hits at the end. * Minor cleanup of text output. * Print "processing" status every time a file is opened; this is flushed, so that monitoring the status with "less" works well. * Added the "--quiet" option, so that status information can be suppressed. 2001-06-06 David A. Wheeler * Added support for file globbing on Windows/NT/DOS (it's not needed for Cygwin - it's only needed when run natively). File globbing characters are correctly ignored in Unix-like ("posix") systems, since the Unix shell does this for us. 2001-05-29 David A. Wheeler * Fixed manual page to close the "/*" comment with "*/". 2001-05-29 David A. Wheeler * Fixed a bug in directive handling, now directives work properly. I only noticed this AFTER release of 0.14, sigh. * Fixed the ChangeLog, to note the addition of --neverignore. * Released version 0.15. 2001-05-29 David A. Wheeler * Fixed a minor problem in string handling; a string containing \\ followed immediately by the double-quote mark (end of the string) wasn't correctly handled. Now it is. * Added information in the documentation describing how to ignore hits on a specific line (a comment directive). Flawfinder has always had this ability (since 0.12), but now it's documented. Before, you had to read the test file test.c or the actual flawfinder code to learn about this ability. * Added the "--neverignore" / "-n" option. * Having a number of conversations with John Viega comparing RATS and flawfinder, with the goal of finding a way to coordinate and have a "best of breed" scanner. This hasn't produced a concrete result, but Viega will soon post a comparison paper that I've had input on. * Released version 0.14. 2001-05-25 David A. Wheeler * Fixed a minor error in that parameter parser; previously it might have trouble with embedded preprocessor commands in the middle of parameter lists. * Added this ChangeLog. * Released version 0.13. 2001-05-21 David A. Wheeler * Initial release of flawfinder version 0.12.