Taming 2,500 compiler warnings with CodeQL, an OpenVPN2 case study
Summary: During a security review of OpenVPN2, Trail of Bits faced roughly 2,500 implicit integer conversion warnings from compiler flags like -Wconversion and built a custom CodeQL query that narrowed them to 20 high-priority cases. After reviewing those 20, the team found none were exploitable in OpenVPN2's context, and the query is published on GitHub for use on other C codebases.
Bottom line: Manual review of 2,500+ warnings is impractical, and most flag benign conversions, so the security-relevant subset stays buried until targeted static analysis pulls it out - here, 20 cases out of 2,500.
Read the original at Trail of Bits Blog ↗
- Topics
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