
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.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.