man pscan (Commandes) - Format string security checker for C source code

NAME

pscan - Format string security checker for C source code

SYNOPSIS

pscan [options] pscan is a source code analysis tool which is designed to highlight potentially dangerous uses of variadic functions such as "printf", "syslog", etc.

DETAILS

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 <aland@ox.org>