PVS-Studio 6.24 released

by Andrey Karpov

Support for Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio, ARM compiler was added under Windows\Linux. 8 new diagnostics were introduced to detect errors in C and C++ code. In addition to the development of new diagnostics, we continue improving Data-Flow analysis that enables old diagnostics find more bugs. Thanks to these improvements, the analyzer finds more interesting errors, like the one we described in the article "February 31". Download and try PVS-Studio.

PVS-Studio is now available on macOS: 64 weaknesses in the Apple's XNU Kernel

by Andrey Karpov

Although the XNU Kernel is relatively small, it's a challenge to study the analyzer warnings alone, which takes much time. False positives make the check more complicated, since I haven't performed the preliminary analyzer configuration. I just quickly looked through the warnings, writing out code fragments that, in my opinion, represent interest. This is more than enough for writing a quite large article. PVS-Studio analyzer easily finds a large number of interesting bugs.

PVS-Studio 6.21 Release

by PVS-Studio Team

• Support for CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) was added to C/C++/C# analyzers.
• HTML log with source code navigation can now be saved from Visual Studio plug-ins and the Standalone tool.
• WDK (Windows Driver Kit) projects for Visual Studio 2017 are now supported.
• PVS-Studio plug-in for SonarQube was updated for the latest LTS version 6.7.
• V1007. The value from the uninitialized optional is used. Probably it is a mistake.

PVS-Studio Reports Now in Html

by Svyatoslav Razmyslov

It allows you to search for and sort messages by type, file, level, code, and warning text. What makes it special is that it allows you to navigate faulty fragments in the source files pointed out by the analyzer. The reported source files themselves are copied to Html and become part of the report. To see how FullHtml really looks like, I converted in this format one of the latest reports, which I've used when writing the article about the MuseScore project: MuseScoreHtml.7z.

Useful Improvements in the PVS-Studio 6.17 Release

by Andrey Karpov

A much more interesting feature is that a mechanism of virtual values was significantly redesigned in the kernel of C++ analyzer. For example, now the analyzer performs a double loop passage, which allows it to define the range of possible values of variables, changing in a loop, more accurately. So don't be surprised if the analyzer starts issuing many warnings for that code which used to seem correct for the analyzer.

PVS-Studio: searching software weaknesses

by Andrey Karpov, Phillip Khandeliants

PVS-Studio has always been able to detect a large number of various security defects (potential vulnerabilities) in the program code. However, historically, we positioned PVS-Studio as a tool to search for errors. We see a trend in the software development to look for vulnerabilities in the code, although it is just the same. It seems to us that it is high time to do the rebranding of our static analyzer PVS-Studio. We will start with Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE). This article provides a table that shows matches of PVS-Studio diagnostic warnings of with the classifier. The table will be gradually updated and changed, but we can already use the table to write articles about security defects detected in projects. We suppose it would attract more attention of the software security specialists.

How PVS-Studio does the bug search: methods and technologies

by Andrey Karpov

The definition of the pattern looks quite simple, but in practice the implementation of the diagnostic is quite complicated. It's not enough just to analyze only "#define RShift(a) a >> 3". If warnings are issued for all strings of this kind, there will be too many of them. We should have a look at the way the macro expands in every particular case, and try to define the situations where it was done intentionally, and when the brackets are really missing.

How to use PVS-Studio for free

by Andrey Karpov

Some developers may say that they don't want to see two additional lines of code at the beginning of the file with the comments not related to the project itself. It is their right, and they may simply not use the tool. Or they can purchase a commercial license, and use it without any restrictions. We see these comments as a gratuity for the provided license, and also as an additional way to promote our product. I think it's a good, fair exchange.

Finding bugs in the code of LLVM project with the help of PVS-Studio

by Andrey Karpov

LLVM developers, of course, will be able to understand if there is a bug here or not. I have to play detective. Looking at the code, I was thinking in the following direction: The function should read the opening bracket '<', then it reads the identifiers and commas in the loop. If there is no comma, we expected a closing bracket. If something goes wrong, then the function returns an error code. I reckon there was supposed to be the following algorithm of the function work (pseudocode).

PVS-Studio for Linux

Starting with the 6.10 version, PVS-Studio analyzer supports not only Windows, but the Linux too.

PVS-Studio performs static code analysis and generates a report that helps a programmer find and fix bugs. PVS-Studio performs a wide range of code checks, it is also useful to search for misprints and Copy-Paste errors. Demonstrative examples of such errors: V501, V517, V522, V523, V571, V611.

The new Linux version (.deb, .rpm, .tgz) is available for download on the page: http://www.viva64.com/en/pvs-studio-download-linux/