Some anon called "R" left a comment today, but it was on a page where I had accidentally left comments on, so I won't publish it. He complained about false positives in graudit, and it is not the first time I have head this, or seen it for that matter. So I thought I would address it publicly, R's comment was;
This is true (I mostly see it around function names containing mail) and I would very much like to correct all the false positives matches and avoid any false negative ones too for that matter. However, this is a hobby project for me. I am not a company selling software, nor am I paid or given time off by my employer to work on graudit. Therefore my contribution to the project very much depends on my real life activities.
Graudit is meant to be a rough auditing tool. You run it against large/new projects so you can pick some starting points for your audit or even spot some low hanging fruit. It is not a complete solution and cannot validate whether what it highlights is exploitable or not. Since it uses grep it saves me from spending time on parsing engines for the supported languages, but it does make it harder to write signatures that are completely free of false positives. Regular expressions aren't that great for parsing :(
However, it is opensource, feel free to fix the issue and submit a patch, otherwise you will probably have to wait for version 1.5+ before any radical changes to the signatures happen. Until then I guess you will have to live with some false positives.
"graudit seems to trip on things like "update_profile(", proudly hilighting "file(" :)"
This is true (I mostly see it around function names containing mail) and I would very much like to correct all the false positives matches and avoid any false negative ones too for that matter. However, this is a hobby project for me. I am not a company selling software, nor am I paid or given time off by my employer to work on graudit. Therefore my contribution to the project very much depends on my real life activities.
Graudit is meant to be a rough auditing tool. You run it against large/new projects so you can pick some starting points for your audit or even spot some low hanging fruit. It is not a complete solution and cannot validate whether what it highlights is exploitable or not. Since it uses grep it saves me from spending time on parsing engines for the supported languages, but it does make it harder to write signatures that are completely free of false positives. Regular expressions aren't that great for parsing :(
However, it is opensource, feel free to fix the issue and submit a patch, otherwise you will probably have to wait for version 1.5+ before any radical changes to the signatures happen. Until then I guess you will have to live with some false positives.
