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PSCAN(1) General Commands Manual PSCAN(1)

NAME

pscan - Format string security checker for C source code

SYNOPSIS

pscan [options]

DESCRIPTION

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