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)