Secure Software Development and Code Analysis Tools

The first half of this document discusses secure coding techniques. The main languages chosen to facilitate the discussion are Perl, Java, and C/C++. These were chosen due to their popularity and extended usage in the software development community. The latter section of this document contains the results of the research and tests conducted on some freely available source code analysis tools. All these tools have a common objective: To quickly scan source code for potential security issues and to communicate them to the user in a detailed, well formatted, easy to understand report. The goal of these tools is not to replace manual reviews, but to facilitate the review process of catching common errors that could lead to security problems.