CodeQL

Source code analysis is consistently regarded as one of the most effective strategies for uncovering vulnerabilities. However, manual reviews can be time consuming, not to mention difficult to scale for large applications or across application portfolios. Advancements in tooling have traditionally not kept pace with the industry’s needs, with security researchers often relying exclusively on non-security focused solutions such as Developer IDEs and grep.

Enter: CodeQL. CodeQL is a semantic code scanning engine that introduces a rich, custom query language. This query language can augment manual source code review by highlighting areas of interest to focus on, or it can be used to model entire vulnerability classes and provide alerts when those models are detected in a code base.

This workshop starts out with an introduction to CodeQL, how it works and what sets it a part from other solutions. It ramps up quickly to showcase how CodeQL can be applied to find vulnerabilities in real world applications. Tips and tricks, as well as strengths and weaknesses will also be covered. No experience is required.