Automatic Static Vulnerability Detection Approaches and Tools: State of the Art

Software vulnerabilities are behind many cybersecurity threats. In fact, if they are exploited, they could cause severe damage to an organization. Thus, finding vulnerabilities in software is a crucial process. However, it often needs both time and expertise. Fortunately, many researchers have focused on automating this process to accelerate the finding of vulnerabilities. Some have worked on making static vulnerability discovery more effective; others have concentrated their research on developing dynamic analysis techniques. This paper presents some of the research that focuses on static analysis approaches and discusses the main differences between them. At the end of this paper, we experiment and analyze the most popular tools that have implemented these approaches and their main weaknesses. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.