Microsoft this week announced a new source code analyzer designed to identify interesting characteristics of code.
Called Microsoft Application Inspector, the new tool doesn’t focus on discovering poor programming practices in the analyzed code. Instead, it looks for interesting features and metadata, such as cryptography, connections to remote resources, and the underlying platform.
The need for such a source code analyzer, the tech giant says, is rooted in the broad use of multiple components when building an application, including proprietary and open source code.
Although code reuse brings a great deal of benefits, such as faster time-to-market, quality, and interoperability, it also increases risks and comes with the cost of hidden complexity, Microsoft explains.
Unlike typical static analysis tools, which rather focus on identifying issues in the analyzed code, Application Inspector attempts to identify characteristics, to help determine what the software is or does.
“Basically, we created Application Inspector to help us identify risky third party software components based on their specific features, but the tool is helpful in many non-security contexts as well,” Microsoft says.
With the new tool, key changes in a component’s feature set over time (version to version) can be identified, as well as increased attack surface or the introduction of malicious code.
The cross-platform, command-line tool can output results in multiple formats, including JSON and interactive HTML, and includes hundreds of feature detection patterns, tailored for popular programming languages, Microsoft says.
Supported types of characteristics include application frameworks (development, testing); cloud / service APIs (Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud Platform); cryptography (symmetric, asymmetric, hashing, and TLS); data types (sensitive, personally identifiable information); operating system functions (platform identification, file system, registry, and user accounts); and security features (authentication and authorization).
Application Inspector was released in open source and is available for download from Microsoft’s GitHub repository.
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