Best Static Code Analysis Tools for Source Code

If you are a software developer or a code review security expert, you often need to analyse your source code to detect security flaws and maintain a secure quality code. But there can be many code issues that are hard to discover manually. After all, we are still humans, so even the most senior security analyst misses some security flaws. Here come our open source static code analysis tools to rescue us. This powerful tool quickly and automatically checks everything under the hood without executing the code and becomes a perfect companion to the human eye.

Source code analysis tools are also referred to as Static Application Security Testing tools or SAST tools, which are designed to provide immediate feedback to the developer on issues they might introduce in the code, which is very useful compared to finding vulnerabilities much later during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). 

With the increase in creating a quality secure code from the beginning, there is a more significant shift towards adopting these tools. Nowadays, many tools are available in the market but the commercial options are too expensive for startups and freelancers. Don’t worry; here is a list of some top free and open-source static code analysis tools.

Best Static Code Analysis Tools

1. VisualCodeGrepper

A superfast and powerful source code analysis tool for commonly used most popular programming languages, and specific scan tools,   VisualCodeGrepper is an automated tool for C, C++, C#, VB, PHP, Java, PL/SQL, and COBOL, which drastically speed up the code review process by identifying the insecure code. It tries to find phrases within comments that can indicate broken code and provides detailed reports through stats and pie charts. It has some excellent features which make it very useful to anyone conducting code analysis, especially when time is costly:

Pros

• Using this tool, you can analyse most of the modern and the old popular programming languages like C, C++, Java, PHP, COBOL, etc. Just specify the language you are using to correctly identify and analyse the code.
• You can run several scan operations depending upon the type and complexity of your project. Among the possible functions, it helps you trigger a complete scan process for code. A new window is brought up instantly during this process, with a chart displaying each component for better analysis.
• Provides a nice pie chart for the entire codebase, which shows relative proportions of code, whitespace, comments, and harmful code.

Cons

• Displayed a list to view each project and the possible errors, security flaws, number of comments, percentage of the whole project, and potentially unsafe flags and bits of code.
• Performs many complex checks and allows you to add any impaired functions that you want to search for with a config file for each language.
• Attempts to find a range of phrases within comments that can indicate broken code.
• Searches intelligently to find buffer overflows and signed or unsigned comparisons.
• Many false positives

2. Rips

RIPS (Re-Inforce Programming Security) is a language-specific static code analysis tool for PHP. It automatically detects the security vulnerabilities in PHP applications and is ideal for application development. This tool supports significant PHP security checks. It can be deployed as self-hosted software or as a cloud service, with SDLC integration and relevant industry standards. No other tools but RIPS can detect the most complex security bugs which are deeply nested inside the code with perfect accuracy; hence it is the ideal choice for analysing your code.

Pros

• On-premises scanning of code with local installation for code privacy.
• Seamlessly fully automatic security testing and report for code vulnerabilities. Hence after integration with build tools.
• It tracks your application progresses throughout the development lifecycle and finds the risks and vulnerabilities in your code instantly so that you can fix the issues as soon as possible,
• This tool is very popular for its speed. It scans your code at lightning speed. Even the huge magneto code with 2.2 billion lines is scanned in less than 20 min.

Cons

• outdated scanner, and its support has been discontinued
• While this scanner has a perfect approach to parsing and lexing the PHP source code by querying the methods using AST “Abstract syntax tree”, only basic checks are made on the PHP source code.

3. Brakeman 

It is a free and open-source code vulnerability scanner specially designed for the Ruby on Rails applications. It is a static code analyser that scans the Ruby on Rails application code to find security issues at any stage during development. Unlike many other web security scanners, this tool looks at your application’s source code; hence, there’s no need to set up the whole application stack to use it. After scanning the application code, it produces a detailed report of all the security issues.

Pros

• Just run this tool without any necessary configuration. It requires no prior setups or configuration once it will install.
• Run It Anytime, at any stage of the development process. Just generate a new application with rails new and check instantly,
• Provide complete coverage of an application. This analyser can identify security vulnerabilities before they become exploitable.
• Provides Flexible Testing; each check performed is independent so that testing can be flexible with Barkman,
• It is much faster than “black box” website scanners, and even the large applications will scan within a few minutes.

4.   Flawfinder 

Flawfinder is a free, simple program that scans C or C++ source code that quickly identifies possible security flaws and produces a report sorted by risk level. It is available as open-source software and is very useful for quickly finding and removing potential security issues before the program is widely released.  While very easy to use and specifically designed to be easy to install with python’s pip comes with a simple user guide. It is compatible with Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) and has earned the CII Best Practices passing badge. Helpful for beginners and gives a simple introduction to static source code analysis tools. It is designed for use on Unix, Cygwin, Linux-based systems, and macOS as a command-line tool and only requires Python 2.7 or Python 3.

• Easy to install and use. It is the perfect tool for getting started with code analysis.
• It is free, open-source software with an OSI-approved license,
• Works even if you can’t build the software
• It is super fast and can examine more extensive programs in a relatively minimal period.
• It has a greater hit density (hits per thousand lines of source code).

5.   Bandit

It is a free tool specially designed to find common security issues in Python code. While processes each file with appropriate plugins and generates a detailed report of possible security bugs in the python code. It is open-source software with  Apache License 2.0. This tool can be used during development or afterwards to find common security issues in Python code before putting the code in production or to use this tool to analyse existing projects and find possible flaws.
 

• Command-line interface to scan your python code.
• Supports CSV, HTML or JSON files.
• Allows specifying the path of a baseline report for ignoring known vulnerabilities that you believe are non-issues.
• Version control integration using pre-commit.
• Allows users to write and register extensions for checks.
• Being an open-source project, contribution to Bandit is always welcome!

6. PMD

This free, open-source tool works on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. We used Windows Chocolatey to install and run on the sample product, i.e. an open-source chat application.

It supports many programming languages such as Java, JSP, apex, PLSQL, and HTML source code.

Pros

• PMD will use directly on the codebase in a file system.
• It has an excellent custom rule designer to write rules using ruleset XML.
• It will integrate with other analyser tools as well as IDEs.
• Plugins are available for Maven, Gradle, Eclipse, NetBeans, JBuilder, JDeveloper, and IntelliJ IDEA.

Cons

• It will gear towards code-style checking as well as common programming flaws only.
• Resource hungry, cannot run a single category or rule on 32GB memory with an Intel Core i8 processor.
• Scan reports are available in textual format, i.e. very simple HTML, text, or XML with basic information.

7. Microsoft Application Inspector

MS Application Inspector seems to be a basic code analysis tool, and rule checking is based on RegEx patterns. It is helpful for scenarios to identify signatures and patterns in code, such as using a specific library or reference. It is straightforward to set up/configure and run locally. This is an excellent tool to run on product source code to look at the product environment and technologies used quickly. It can further identify application features and will modify to report missing features or something we wanted to see in the software application.

Pros

• Very simple and easy to set up and write rules
• Excellent tool for identifying application features, i.e. Build System is present, Use of OpenSource libraries, etc.

Cons

• Feature checking is based on RegEx signature checking of these features.
• The number of false negatives and false positives is higher than other open-source tools.

Conclusion:

With the help of these code review tools, the quality of the software will get improved by eliminating the possible bugs in the application. These tools automate the review process, which minimises the manual reviewing task of the code. The overall quality of the software gets improved by locating the issues that were unnoticed in the initial phase of development. As commercial tools aren’t for everyone, and there is an array of open-source static source code analysis options, only a few are good. It would help if you used the given powerful tools depending on your project and programming language.