Dissecting and Digging Application Source Code for Vulnerabilities

Application source code scanning for vulnerability detection is an interesting challenge and relatively complex problem as well. There are several security issues which are difficult to identify using blackbox testing and these issues can be identified by using whitebox source code testing methodlogy. Application layer security issues may be residing at logical layer and it is very important to have source code audit done to unearth these categories of bugs.

This paper is going to address following areas:

1. How to build simple rules using method and class signatures to identify possible weak links in the source code.
2. How to do source code walking across the entire source base to perform impact analysis.
3. How to use simple tool like AppCodeScan1 or similar utility to perform effective source code analysis to detect possible vulnerability residing in your source base.

Download the paper in PDF format here.