Most people are familiar with common vulnerabilities in PHP code, such as SQL Injections and XSS. SQL Injections can be prevented by using a good data base abstraction layer, but there may be old code which depends on developers manually sanitizing input. XSS vulnerabilities may not be dealt with properly, nor may command execution vulnerabilities using functions such as system().
Static code analysis (SCA) can help identify issues such as these without having to execute anything, by analyzing the source code. This talk will discuss the process of SCA in general, issues unique to dynamic languages such as PHP, then a particular FOSS tool for PHP SCA.
Video producer: http://linux.conf.au/