Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs)
From: Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2015 20:42:32 -0400
On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 8:31 PM, Michal Zalewski <lcamtuf () coredump cx> wrote:
Clang and its analyzers found a number of issues a couple of years ago. As far as I know, the results were dismissed. See "Clang 3.3 and Scan-Build results",Well, I can kinda sympathize. Somebody took one of my OSS projects (p0f) and ran it through a static analyzer a while ago (the analyzer shall remain nameless, but was one of the major ones). The results were just pages and pages of nonsensical findings, interspersed with non-specific style recommendations.
I've felt the pain myself. So I'm definitely in the sympathize camp.
An experience like that can quickly divide developers into two camps: the "not sure, but let me spend a week to address everything, just in case" one, and the "show me faulting test cases or get lost" bunch.
Yeah, its a trade off. We know developers are smarter than the analyzers. But rather than developers working with the analyzers - like initializing a variable even if it does not need to be done (and letting the optimizer do its job) - they just dismiss all the results. They dismiss both the valid ones and the noise. Its a very disingenuous strategy. Its no wonder software has so many problems with security. Until developers abandon the l33t, 1970's K&R way of doing things, improvement will continue to move at a snail's pace.
I've heard it summed up this way: when a particular check is stable and reliable enough to be actually useful to most developers, it stops being called "static analysis" and becomes a "standard compiler warning" =)
Haha, yes. Be careful with Clang and the dynamic analyzers. They *don't* produce false positives because they operate on real data. Jeff _______________________________________________ Sent through the Full Disclosure mailing list https://nmap.org/mailman/listinfo/fulldisclosure Web Archives & RSS: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/
Current thread:
- several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) Michal Zalewski (Apr 14)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) Paul Vixie (Apr 14)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) Hanno Böck (Apr 16)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) jungle Boogie (Apr 19)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) Michal Zalewski (Apr 19)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) jungle Boogie (Apr 19)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) Jeffrey Walton (Apr 19)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) Michal Zalewski (Apr 19)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) Jeffrey Walton (Apr 19)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) Michal Zalewski (Apr 19)
- Re: several issues in SQLite (+ catching up on several other bugs) Reed Loden (Apr 20)