GrammaTech Releases CodeSonar 4

ITHACA, NY — GrammaTech, Inc., a leading maker of tools that improve and accelerate embedded software development, today announced the commercial availability of CodeSonar 4, the latest version of the company’s flagship software analysis tool for C/C++, Java, and machine code. Designed to meet the growing challenges of embedded app developers, CodeSonar 4 includes new capabilities for analyzing third-party code, achieving standards compliance, eliminating challenging multi-core issues, and improving code security by addressing dangerous information flows. CodeSonar advances the state of the art in automated code analysis to help embedded development teams improve code quality and security while accelerating time-to-market.

“The cost of failure in embedded systems is unlike that of any other industry due to the safety-critical role they play in our everyday lives – which is a main reason organizations who build embedded applications are early adopters of automated advanced code analysis tools like CodeSonar,” said Andre Girard, Senior Analyst at VDC. “Teams that leverage innovative technology to tackle the pressing challenges of embedded software development today such as the use of third-party code, compliance with standards, and the complexity of concurrency can realize significant business and competitive advantages.”

Designed for zero-tolerance embedded defect environments, CodeSonar analyzes binary code and source code, to identify serious security and quality liabilities that cause system crashes, memory corruption, leaks, data races, and other unexpected vulnerabilities. New advances in CodeSonar 4 address:

• Software Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM)
  New Integrated Binary Analysis in CodeSonar 4 empowers developers to analyze externally produced software without access to its source code. This eliminates the dangerous quality and security blind spots created by using open source or third-party components and libraries in embedded applications.
• Standards Compliance
  The increasing regulation of embedded software in the form of industry-specific standards for code quality/security continues to gain international momentum. CodeSonar 4 will include built-in analysis for MISRA C 2012, in addition to existing DO-178 analysis capabilities, to help organizations pursue and achieve relevant certifications.
• Multi-Core Development
  With growing usage of multi-core processors and greater dependence on multi-threaded software, CodeSonar 4 delivers new Java-specific concurrency defect detection capabilities to defend against errors like race conditions, deadlocks, and livelocks.
• Embedded Security
  As networking and internet-enabled capabilities continue to proliferate within embedded systems, the attack surface of traditionally isolated applications has expanded in new and unpredictable ways. In addition to robust existing security features, the new visual tainted-data analysis capability in CodeSonar 4 helps developers find and eliminate vulnerabilities caused by potentially dangerous information flows.

“CodeSonar 4 is the automated code analysis tool designed specifically for the rigorous security and quality demands of embedded software,” said Paul Anderson, Vice President of Engineering at GrammaTech. “CodeSonar 4 will address the most complex challenges facing embedded developers by using new analysis capabilities to eliminate the most costly and hard to find defects early in the application development lifecycle.”

To learn more about how CodeSonar 4 accelerates, improves, and secures the production of embedded software, please download GrammaTech’s new white paper: Embedded Software Design: Best Practices for Static Analysis Tools.