em_pscan(1)

em_pscan1

Format string security checker for c source code

Part of pscan(1).

Usage

pscan [options]

Overview

pscan is a source code analysis tool which is designed to highlight potentially dangerous uses of variadic functions such as "printf", "syslog", etc. The scan works by looking for a one of a list of problem functions, and applying the following rule:

IF the last parameter of the function is the format string, AND the format string is NOT a static string, THEN complain.

Limitations

The code will not report on some potention buffer overflows, because that is not its goal. For example the following code is potential dangerous:

sprintf(static_buffer, %s/.foorc", getenv("HOME"));"

This code could cause an issue as there is no immediately obvious bounds checking. However this is a safe usages with regards to format strings.

Return values

If there are any errors found, pscan exits with status 1.

Author

Alan DeKok <[email protected]>

From emboss 5.0.0-7 in Debian 5.0 (Lenny). Parsed by carta from the page's man source.