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Static analysis tools are frequently used to scan the source code and detect deviations from the project coding guidelines. Given their importance, linters are often introduced to classrooms to educate students on how to detect and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Salma Abdullah AlOmar , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

Regular expressions are a concise yet expressive language for expressing patterns. For instance, in networked software, they are used for input validation and intrusion detection. Yet some widely deployed regular expression matchers based…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2013-01-08 James Kirrage , Asiri Rathnayake , Hayo Thielecke

Security attacks targeting smart contracts have been on the rise, which have led to financial loss and erosion of trust. Therefore, it is important to enable developers to discover security vulnerabilities in smart contracts before…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Asem Ghaleb , Karthik Pattabiraman

The sources of reliable, code-level information about vulnerabilities that affect open-source software (OSS) are scarce, which hinders a broad adoption of advanced tools that provide code-level detection and assessment of vulnerable OSS…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Therese Fehrer , Rocío Cabrera Lozoya , Antonino Sabetta , Dario Di Nucci , Damian A. Tamburri

Static code analyzers are widely used to help find program flaws. However, in practice the effectiveness and usability of such analyzers is affected by the problems of false negatives (FNs) and false positives (FPs). This paper aims to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Han Cui , Menglei Xie , Ting Su , Chengyu Zhang , Shin Hwei Tan

When assessing the potential impact of code-level vulnerabilities, e.g., discovered by automated analyzers, it is essential to consider them in the context of the system's security design. However, this is a challenging task due to the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Sven Peldszus , Frederik Reiche , Kevin Hermann , Sophie Corallo , Thorsten Berger , Robert Heinrich

As security becomes more relevant for many companies, the popularity of static program analysis (SPA) tools is increasing. In this paper, we target the use of SPA tools among companies in Germany with a focus on security. We give insights…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-15 Goran Piskachev , Stefan Dziwok , Thorsten Koch , Sven Merschjohan , Eric Bodden

Identifying the software weaknesses exploited by attacks supports efforts to reduce developer introduction of vulnerabilities and to guide security code review efforts. A weakness is a bug or fault type that can be exploited through an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Peter Mell , Irena Bojanova , Carlos Galhardo

Despite their remarkable success, large language models (LLMs) have shown limited ability on safety-critical code tasks such as vulnerability detection. Typically, static analysis (SA) tools, like CodeQL, CodeGuru Security, etc., are used…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Ira Ceka , Feitong Qiao , Anik Dey , Aastha Valecha , Gail Kaiser , Baishakhi Ray

Many tools and libraries are readily available to build and operate distributed Web applications. While the setup of operational environments is comparatively easy, practice shows that their continuous secure operation is more difficult to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2012-07-13 Matteo Maria Casalino , Michele Mangili , Henrik Plate , Serena Elisa Ponta

This paper introduces a method for detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts using static analysis and a multi-objective optimization algorithm. We focus on four types of vulnerabilities: reentrancy, call stack overflow, integer…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Dongcheng Li , W. Eric Wong , Xiaodan Wang , Sean Pan , Liang-Seng Koh

Testing is the most widely employed method to find vulnerabilities in real-world software programs. Compositional analysis, based on symbolic execution, is an automated testing method to find vulnerabilities in medium- to large-scale…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-07-25 Saahil Ognawala , Ricardo Nales Amato , Alexander Pretschner , Pooja Kulkarni

Static program analysis development is a non-trivial and time-consuming task. We present a framework through which developers can define static program analyses in natural language. We show the application of this framework to identify…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Mohammad Mehdi Pourhashem Kallehbasti , Mohammad Ghafari

Organizational, political, and configuration mistakes in the deployment of a static source code analysis tool within a software development organization can result in most of the value of the tool being lost, even while apparently meeting…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Flash Sheridan

Static analysis is an essential component of many modern software development tools. Unfortunately, the ever-increasing complexity of static analyzers makes their coding error-prone. Even analysis tools based on rigorous mathematical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Daniela Ferreiro , Ignacio Casso , Jose F. Morales , Pedro López-García , Manuel V. Hermenegildo

Software vulnerabilities continue to be the primary cause of cyberattacks. It is crucial to identify vulnerabilities in applications' source code before attackers gain access to them and exploit any vulnerability they may contain.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jorge Martins , David Dantas , Rafael Ramires , Bernardo Ferreira , Ibéria Medeiros

The rapid adoption of blockchain technology highlighted the importance of ensuring the security of smart contracts due to their critical role in automated business logic execution on blockchain platforms. This paper provides an empirical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Francesco Salzano , Cosmo Kevin Antenucci , Simone Scalabrino , Giovanni Rosa , Rocco Oliveto , Remo Pareschi

Static Code Analyzers (SCAs) have played a critical role in software quality assurance. However, SCAs with various static analysis techniques suffer from different levels of false positives and false negatives, thereby yielding the varying…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Xiuting Ge , Chunrong Fang , Xuanye Li , Ye Shang , Mengyao Zhang , Ya Pan

Static analysis is one of the most widely adopted techniques to find software bugs before code is put in production. Designing and implementing effective and efficient static analyses is difficult and requires high expertise, which results…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Andrew Habib , Michael Pradel

Background. Developers use Automated Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) to control for potential quality issues in source code, including defects and technical debt. Tool vendors have devised quite a number of tools, which makes it harder for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Valentina Lenarduzzi , Savanna Lujan , Nyyti Saarimaki , Fabio Palomba