
I work at Red Hat on the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). In GCC 10, I added the new -fanalyzer
option, a static analysis pass for identifying various problems at compile-time, rather than at runtime. The initial implementation was aimed at early adopters, who found a few bugs, including a security vulnerability: CVE-2020-1967. Bernd Edlinger, who discovered the issue, had to wade through many false positives accompanying the real issue. Other users also managed to get the analyzer to crash on their code.
I’ve been rewriting the analyzer to address these issues in the next major release, GCC 11. In this article, I describe the steps I’m taking to reduce the number of false positives and make this static analysis tool more robust.
Continue reading “Static analysis updates in GCC 11”