[Gretl-devel] Re: Static code analysis of gretl

On Tue, 24 Aug 2021, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote: > On Tue, 24 Aug 2021, Sven Schreiber wrote: > >> Thanks, Hélio, this is potentially very useful. Artur came up with a >> similar (I think) automated analysis in the past, and a few code >> improvements resulted from that. >> >> OTOH, I'm sure that the true number of flaws and bugs is nowhere near >> the astronomical number reported there. I'd say the artificial >> intelligence there is not mature enough yet and the result needs more >> filtering. But I'm especially curious about the assessment of what they >> call potential security flaws. > > I gave it a brief look. From a quick and non-systematic spot-check, it would > seem that many traditional C idioms are marked as potentially dangerous, but > from what I've seen we're OK. I've been looking through the list of 1.2K bugs. It's a mixed bag. Several hundred "bugs" are in the HTML files -- use of tags that are deprecated in HTML 5 and the like. Among the ones in the C code, some are very useful catches and many are plain wrong. Things that the diagnostic is good at catching include: * Left- and right-hand operands identical in use of logical operators, as in "if (na(dx) || na(dx))", which is obviously a typo but might never be spotted by the human eye. * Repeated conditions within if/else if/else if... constructions: only the first one would ever be triggered; subsequent ones may well be the result of half-baked copy-and-paste. * Possible use-after-free of allocated objects. * Possible failure to release allocated memory. I've fixed some of these already. Things the diagnostic is pretty poor at: * Diagnosis of null-pointer dereference. This _would_ be very useful but for the fact that the majority are false positives. * The same goes for reading off the end of arrays: some instances may be right but many false positives. Allin_______________________________________________ Gretl-devel mailing list -- gretl-devel(a)gretlml.univpm.it To unsubscribe send an email to gretl-devel-leave(a)gretlml.univpm.it Website: https://gretlml.univpm.it/postorius/lists/gretl-devel.gretlml.univpm.it/