ZDNet UK

CBS INTERACTIVE UK BUSINESS SITES:
BNET UK
silicon.com
ZDNet.co.uk

You are here: ZDNet.co.uk > News > Software

Desktop platforms Toolkit

Microsoft turns to automatic code checks

Published: 27 May 2004 12:25 BST

Although developers test their software today for flaws, the testing is usually structured to determine if the software works properly rather than whether intentionally improper actions cause the software to fail.

According to Armistead, software developers say, "I am not going to catch everything, and (that's OK, because) it is accepted industry practice to ship the product and let people tell me what's wrong with it."

However, not all security researchers come forward with flaws that they find. Moreover, many security experts believe that developers could become legally liable for the software bugs they don't find, especially if the tools are available to detect those errors.

That's why new products to automatically find the errors are making headway. For example, @Stake, company that had focused on security services, now sells a tool to scan a program's binary code so that any user can test software security. Another company, Reflective, applies several different analysis techniques to scan for flaws.

"Down the road, you want everyone to be using these tools in their compilers," said David Evans, assistant professor for computer science at the University of Virginia and the creator of some of the code analysis technology used by Reflective. "It is a real embarrassment to the industry that people still produce code with buffer overflows."

Buffer overflows are a common memory error that allow online attackers to run malicious code on other people's computers. The MSBlast and Sasser worms both used buffer overflows in Microsoft's Windows operating system to spread across the Internet. Yet buffer overflows aren't new -- security researchers have known about them for three decades.

Despite the potential for these code analysis tools to help alleviate such long-standing problems, not everyone believes the technology is ready for the real world.