Early Look At Tracer 2.0 Beta

Saturday, November 17, 2007 At 5:36PM

So, continuing in the vein of testing Fortify’s various Beta products (see Andrew’s SCA 5.0 sneak peak), I recently got to work with the Fortify Tracer 2.0 beta, which I’ve gotta say was very interesting. If you’re not familiar with Tracer, here’s a little background – out of the box, Tracer inserts monitors into your deployable code, tracks all known inputs, and flags instances where the use of certain API’s with those inputs are either un-validated or used in an insecure manner. This sets the table for more thorough coverage when you’re performing Black Box testing. It is well known that many “set and forget” automated scanners almost never hit every available page which leads to gaps in testing and lots of frustration. Tracer fills those voids and is especially handy for performing Black Box app testing when in a time crunch.

Older releases of Tracer were ideally geared towards use by security professionals. However, with Tracer 2.0, the user only needs to be able to crawl the entire application. Whether it’s manual or automated, no penetration testing procedures are needed. This is a bonus for those non-security professionals that want to be able to easliy add this tool to their pre-deployment check-list.

Another nice addition included in Tracer 2.0 is the increased ease of setting up the tool. Previously with Tracer 1.1, you would run the compile-time instrumentation against your J2EE executable (deployable WAR or EAR file) using the supplied command line tool. You would then have to manually deploy the WAR file that you just instrumented into your environment.

Example of 1.1 command line syntax:

C:>tracer.bat -a Tomcat5 --appserver-home "C:Program FilesFortify SoftwareFortify Tracer 1.1Coretomcat" --coverage "com.order.splc.*" splc.war

Tracer 2.0 Beta has made the instrumentation process MUCH easier. They’ve introduced a new method called “load-time weaving,” where the monitors are introduced when the class files are loaded rather than before the application is deployed. This makes for a very fast instrumentation process and you don’t have to redeploy your application anymore.

To instrument using load-time weaving, Tracer 2.0 comes with an app called Tracerltw (Figure 1). This web application allows you to just give it the web root directory of the application you want it to monitor. Users will find this point and click instrumentation much easier and more intuitive than the previous command line options.

Another nice feature is support for .NET applications. Previous releases were strictly limited to J2EE applications. In general, Fortify seems to be broadening their language coverage for all their products. Just look at SCA 5.0 and its support for 4 more languages.

This is a very green beta, so as new functionality comes out in future beta releases, I’ll keep you updated.

Gotham Digital Science, LLC (GDS), is a wholly owned subsidiary of Aon, PLC

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