These checkers enforce the CERT C Secure Coding rules, and are freely available from their SourceForge project. For questions regarding the CERT ROSE checkers, contact secure-coding at cert dot org.
Running the ROSE CERT C Checkers
The ROSE CERT C Checkers are built into a program called 'rosecheckers'.
To run the rosecheckers program on a C or C++ file, simply pass the file as an argument:
| Code Block |
|---|
rosecheckers hello.c |
If the C file violates some secure coding rules, the rosecheckers program will print them out. If the rosecheckers program can not find any violations, it prints nothing.
Rosecheckers actually takes the same arguments as gcc. So if your code has special flags that must be passed to the compiler, such as locations of include files, you can pass them to rosecheckers in the same manner as gcc. Likewise, if you have a makefile that indicates how your program is to be built, you can run ROSE on your source code merely by instructing to your make command to use rosecheckers as a drop-in replacement for gcc. One way to do this is:
| Code Block |
|---|
make CC=rosecheckers |
There are three ways to run the ROSE CERT C checkers. They are available on CMU's Andrew system. In addition you can run them using a downloadable VM. Finally, you can build the CERT checkers, as well as ROSE itself, from source.
ROSE CERT C Checkers on Andrew
To run these checkers, you must have an Andrew account at CMU. The rosecheckers program is available in:
| Code Block |
|---|
/afs/andrew/usr/svoboda/public/c_rules |
To run rosecheckers, you simply add this directory to your PATH environment variable.
ROSE CERT C Checkers on a Virtual Machine
To run these checkers, you must use a virtualization system such as VMWare. The Sourceforge project provides a free example VM.
Once extracted, the rosebud directory is a VM image that can be powered on by VMWare. After logging in, you'll need to enter your login password again when the system asks for a sudo password. This is so the VM image can generate a unique SSH key.
After that, you should be able to access the VM from your host machine remotely using SSH. You'll need the VM's IP address for this, which you can learn with this command from the VM:
| Code Block |
|---|
ip addr | grep /24 |
If it provides multiple IP addresses, select the one that begins
/192.168.../.
In the VM's home directory, there is a README file explaining what software is available there. It includes both ROSE and the CERT Secure Coding rule checkers.
Building Rosecheckers
To build the rosecheckers program from the CERT C Checkers, type:
| Code Block |
|---|
make pgms |
To test rosecheckers on the code samples from the CERT C Secure Coding Rules:
| Code Block |
|---|
make tests |
To build API documentation pages, you must have doxygen installed:
| Code Block |
|---|
make doc |
To clean documentation pages and build files:
| Code Block |
|---|
make clean |
Secure Coding Rules Enforced by Rosecheckers
The C Secure Coding Rules are freely available.
Here is a breakdown of how thoroughly rosecheckers enforces the C Secure Coding Rules:
Complete | 57 | ROSE catches all violations of these rules |
Partial | 45 | ROSE catches some, but not all violations of these rules |
false-positive | 9 | These rules could be checked by rosecheckers, but they will also catch some false positives. |
Potential | 29 | These rules are not checked by rosecheckers, but could be |
Undoable | 32 | These rules could not be checked by ROSE due to various limitations in ROSE. |
Unenforceable | 48 | These rules could not be checked by any tool that relies purely on unaided static analysis. |
TOTAL | 220 |