Needed: code auditors [LWN.net]

Needed: code auditors

Posted Feb 5, 2004 5:49 UTC (Thu) by jamesm (guest, #2273)
Parent article: Needed: code auditors

While I agree that more needs to be done, I think this article misses good audting that occurs at several points:

1) When patches are submitted.

2) When other developers need to modify code and walk the codepaths with a fresh/different viewpoint.

3) When new developers start poking around to figure out how things work e.g. the kernelnewbies project has been the source of many, many kernel bugfix patches due to this.

4) When code review happens privately (or semi privately) before upstream submission.

5) Research and commercial projects which methodically look for classes of bugs (e.g. Stanford checker).

Code audit is more than planned, specific, high publicity projects (not to say that these are not useful).

It might be useful to find out more about why Sardonix failed. I'd guess that it was on a social level, rather than a technical one.

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