We have suddenly realized that there are opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation between us and information security experts. Those experts who specialize in search of vulnerabilities in software code can use the PVS-Studio analyzer for free in their research. This will, in its turn, make our tool more popular if it succeeds in finding vulnerabilities. PVS-Studio can check projects written in C and C++.

It all started with the open letter "PVS-Studio Team Willing to Work on Improving Tizen Project" with which we intended to attract Samsung Electronics' attention. Samsung cares about reliability and security of the Tizen OS and carries out various kinds of research in this area. For example, they invested over $10 million in Svace static analyzer developed in the Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Science. So, we thought that the Tizen developers would probably find PVS-Studio analyzer useful as well since it managed to detect bugs in their project.

After that we were contacted by Amihai Neiderman (@AAAAAAmihai) who showed interest in PVS-Studio's capabilities. Coincidentally, he gave a conference talk about vulnerabilities in the Tizen OS (Breaking Tizen) just a month ago.

We exchanged a few emails, and then our company granted Amihai Neiderman a PVS-Studio license to use in his further research of vulnerability detection. It's unknown if he will be lucky to find any issues using our analyzer, but why not give it a try? If he is, then everyone will benefit from it. We gave Amihai Neiderman a new tool capable of detecting suspicious code where vulnerabilities may hide. If he succeeds and finds such issues, it will be a nice opportunity for him to mention PVS-Studio in his next conference talk. And for us it will be a nice opportunity to get additional promotion.

It was at this point that a good idea occurred to us. It's strange that it hadn't happen earlier, but that's just the way of many good ideas :). We realized that we should start cooperating with other experts studying vulnerabilities, too.

So, if you happen to be a public expert in security and specialize in vulnerability detection, you are welcome to email us to get your PVS-Studio license. We will help you with scanning various projects and provide user support. If you manage to find issues using our tool, we'll appreciate you mentioning it in your articles and talks.

Those willing to get the license and support will need to prove that they deal with software security and are engaged in public activity, for example, writing articles. Anyway, these points will be discussed during our communication. If you are interested, please email us at support [@] viva64.com.

Far not all PVS-Studio diagnostics detect security related errors. For example, the V665 warning is hardly going to be useful if you look for vulnerabilities. Luckily, such diagnostics can be turned off to leave only relevant warnings. As I already said, you can also count on our support if you have any questions.

Note. We haven't positioned our analyzer as a tool for detecting vulnerabilities before. We only discussed regular bugs in our articles. Now we want programmers to view PVS-Studio not only as a tool for detecting typos and other mistakes, but also as a tool that helps prevent multiple vulnerabilities. Many errors detected by PVS-Studio analyzer fall under CWE classification (example). In certain circumstances, CWE issues may turn to CVE ones, so using PVS-Studio allows you not only to eliminate bugs from your code, thus reducing the development cost, but also prevent lots of vulnerabilities.

Supported languages and compilers:

Windows. Visual Studio 2017 C, C++, C++/CLI, C++/CX (WinRT), C#

Windows. Visual Studio 2015 C, C++, C++/CLI, C++/CX (WinRT), C#

Windows. Visual Studio 2013 C, C++, C++/CLI, C++/CX (WinRT), C#

Windows. Visual Studio 2012 C, C++, C++/CLI, C++/CX (WinRT), C#

Windows. Visual Studio 2010 C, C++, C++/CLI, C#

Windows. MinGW C, C++

Windows/Linux. Clang C, C++

Linux. GCC C, C++

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