TRACER: A Platform for Securing Legacy Code

Abstract

A security vulnerability is a programming error that introduces a potentially exploitable weakness into a computer system. Such a vulnerability can severely affect an organization's infrastructure and cause significant financial damage to it. Hence, one of the basic pursuits in every new software release should be to mitigate such defects.A number of tools and techniques are available for performing vulnerability detection in software written in various programming platforms. One of the most common approaches to identify software vulnerabilities is static analysis [1]. This kind of analysis is performed by automated tools either on the program's source or object code and without actually executing it. However, since the formats in which static analysis tools store and present their results vary wildly, it is typically difficult to utilize many of them in the scope of a project. By automating the process of running a variety of vulnerability detectors and collecting their results in an efficient manner during development, the task of tracking security defects throughout the evolution history of software projects can be simplified.In this paper we present tracer, a framework to support the development of secure applications by constantly monitoring software projects for vulnerabilities. tracer simplifies the integration of existing tools that detect software vulnerabilities and promotes their use during development and maintenance.Instead of designing and implementing tracer from the ground up, we built it on top of the open source Alitheia Core [2] platform, which is designed for facilitating large scale quantitative software engineering studies. While Alitheia Core aims for efficient estimation of the quality of software projects, tracer