PVS-Studio 7.12 New Features for Finding Safety and Security Threats

by Nikolay Mironov, Paul Eremeev

Well, to waste no time, let's point out the additions right away. So, here is what's new, safe, and cool in PVS-Studio:

• New diagnostic groups OWASP ASVS and The AUTOSAR C++14 Coding Guidelines have been added to the analyzer. Previously, the compliance of PVS-Studio diagnostic rules with these standards was available only on our website. Now we have more than 50 new diagnostic rules!
• Now the analyzer shows information about the compliance of the warnings with the SEI CERT Coding Standard. This information formerly was available only on the PVS-Studio website.
• The interface of our plugins for Visual Studio, JetBrains Rider, and IntelliJ IDEA has been improved to ease the work with analyzer messages that have safety and security standards identifiers.
• New diagnostic groups (OWASP, AUTOSAR) in PlogConverter are supported.
• New diagnostics (OWASP, AUTOSAR) are supported in SonarQube at the tag level. We classified our diagnostic rules by OWASP Top 10.

Why it is important to apply static analysis for open libraries that you add to your project

by Andrey Karpov

Because of a typo, the original vector is returned, not the new scaledVector container. The same error occurs in the division operator. Facepalm. Again, these errors don't mean anything separately. Although, this is a hint that this library isn't used much and there is highly likely that there are other serious undetected errors in it.

ModernCppStarter & PVS-Studio Static Code Analyzer

by PVS-Studio Team

plog-converter will convert the report into the errorfile format (similar to GCC's messages), which can be conveniently viewed in a terminal window and the IDE. You can also have the report converted to an HTML file by using the -t fullhtml flag. Use the flags -a and -d to filter diagnostics. Run the plog-converter --help command to view the full list of available options.

Why Static Analysis Can Improve a Complex C++ Codebase

by Andrey Karpov

Analyzers know more than even professional developers. It has become too difficult to take into account and remember all the nuances when writing code. For instance, if you haven’t specifically read about it, you’ll never guess that calls to memset function for clearing private data sometimes disappear, as from a compiler’s point of view, a call to memset function is redundant. Meanwhile, it is a serious security defect CWE-14 that is detected literally everywhere.