Linux system programming

Linux kernel software quality and security better than most proprietary enterprise software

Coverity, a software engineering company focused on developing a better way to build software, recently announced results on Linux security compiled over four years of source code analysis of the Linux kernel. Coverity discovered 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code in the recent 2.6 Linux production kernel now shipping in operating system products from Novell and other major Linux software companies.

The former director of cybersecurity for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Amit Yoran, this month told a Washington, D.C. conference on Homeland Security and Information Assurance that automatic code debuggers are required to make software secure.

As commercial software is developed, it typically contains 20 to 30 bugs for every thousand lines of code, according to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium.

The Linux source code analysis project started in 2000 at the Stanford University Computer Science Research Center as part of a massive research initiative to improve core software engineering processes in the software industry. The initiative continues on at Coverity, a commercial software company started by five of the lead Stanford researchers. Coverity customers include the top vendors in networking, electronic design automation and storage, among others.

As a public service, Coverity will start providing bug analysis reports on a regular basis and make a summary of the results freely available to the Linux development community.

"This is a benefit to the Linux development community and we appreciate Coverity's efforts to help us improve the security and stability of Linux," said Andrew Morton, lead Linux kernel maintainer. "We've already addressed the top priority bugs that Coverity has uncovered. It's a very useful system for high quality code."

"Key Linux developers can now use the same tools that many of the world's largest commercial IT vendors have integrated into their software development process," said Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity. "Our findings show that Linux contains 0.17 bugs per thousand lines of code, which is an extremely low defect rate and is evidence of the strong security of Linux. Many security holes in software are the result of software bugs that can be eliminated with good programming processes."

A summary of the bugs is available at http://linuxbugs.coverity.com.

Active members of the Linux kernel development community can obtain detailed bug reports by contacting Coverity.

SWAT's core technology runs on a wide variety of hardware and software platforms used by C and C++ developers. It is unique amongst source code analysis solutions in both its precision and scalability. Unlike many competing technologies, SWAT simulates the effects that the operations in the source code might have in the runtime environment, rather than searching the source code for known, dangerous coding patterns or potentially sloppy coding constructs. The result is that the defects detected by SWAT's analysis platform are potentially disastrous runtime errors that must be fixed in the source code. In addition, SWAT is designed to integrate easily into existing software development practices without any changes to existing build systems or existing development tools.