NAME

       rats - Rough Auditing Tool for Security

SYNOPSIS

       rats [options] [file]...

DESCRIPTION

       rats  is a rough auditing tool for security developed by Secure Software, Inc.  It is a tool for scanning
       C, Perl, PHP, and Python source code and flagging common security  related  programming  errors  such  as
       buffer  overflows and TOCTOU (Time Of Check, Time Of Use) race conditions.  As its name implies, the tool
       performs only a rough analysis of source code.  It will not find every error and will  also  find  things
       that  are  not  errors.   Manual  inspection of your code is still necessary, but greatly aided with this
       tool.

       When started, RATS will scan each file or each file in the directory specified on the  command  line  and
       produce a report when scanning is complete.  What vulnerabilities are reported in the final report depend
       on  the  data contained in the vulnerability database or databases that are used and the warning level in
       use.

       For each vulnerability, the list of files and line numbers where it occured is given, followed by a brief
       description of the vulnerability and suggested action.

OPTIONS

       -h, --help
              Displays a brief usage summary and exit.

       -a <fun>
              Report any occurence of function 'fun' in the source file(s)

       -d <filename>, --database <filename>, --db <filename>
              Specifies a vulnerability database to be loaded.  You  may  have  multiple  -d  options  and  each
              database specified will be loaded.

       -i, --input
              Causes  a  list of function calls that were used which accept external input to be produced at the
              end of the vulnerability report.

       -l <lang>, --language <language>
              Force the specified language to  be  used  regardless  of  filename  extension.   Currently  valid
              language names are "c", "perl", "php" and "python".

       -r, --references
              Causes  references  to vulnerable function calls that are not being used as calls themselves to be
              reported.

       -w <level>, --warning <level>
              Sets the warning level. Valid levels are 1, 2 or 3.

              1 includes only default and high severity.

              2 includes medium severity (default).

              3 includes low severity vulnerabilities.

       -x     Causes the default  vulnerability  databases  (which  are  in  the  installation  data  directory,
              /usr/share/rats by default) to not be loaded.

       -R, --no-recurssion
              Do not recurse subdirectories when encountered.

       --xml  Output in XML

       --html Output in HTML

       --follow-symlinks
              Follow  symlinks  and  treat  them like whatever they are pointing to.  If the symlink points to a
              directory it will be descended into unless -R is specified, if a pointing to a file,  it  will  be
              treated as a file.

AUTHOR

       This  manual  page  was orginally written by Adam Lazur <adam@lazur.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system
       (but may be used by others).

       Modified by Secure Software, Inc.

                                               September 17, 2001                                        RATS(1)