Detect Security Vulnerabilities in your Source Code

Visual Expert checks you code against predefined rules, detect vulnerabilities and locate them precisely.

Code Security Scan

Code Inspection Dashboard

Easily find and fix issues in your code.

300+ rules to improve Security, Quality, and Maintainability.

Check your code under
various angles

  • Detect and remove security vulnerabilities
  • Comply with coding "grammar" standards
  • Comply with code readability standards
  • Architectural layering adherence
  • Remove code duplicates
  • Improve performance
  • And more...

Preview the workload in a dashboard

Generate Code Review Reports

Integrate Static Application Security Testing in your CI/CD Pipeline

Integrate with Jenkins or GitLAB.
Add a code inspection job in your Continuous Integration Workflow.

Perform a full code review each time a build is generated.
Reduce the time between building and fixing issues.

What are the security rules checked by Visual Expert?

  1. Always use AES encryption algorithm in a secure mode
    AES offers several modes (ECB, CBC, CFB…), some of them being faster or safer. Your calls should leverage the most secure one.
  2. Never use Console logging in production
    Console logging is a method to find out what the code is doing. It should be disabled in production, as it could expose sensitive data.
  3. Never use CoSetProxyBlanket or CoInitializeSecurity
    Calls to subroutines CoSetProxyBlanket, CoInitializeSecurity and CoInitializeSecurityAlias can generate security breaches.
  4. Encryption keys should be long enough
    To make cryptographic keys robust against brute force attacks, they must have a sufficient key size.
  5. Database queries should not be vulnerable to injection attacks
    Code injection attacks can perform CRUD operations on sensitive database information through vulnerable queries. Identify SQL queries in your PB Code that accept data from the user because they are prone to injection.
  6. DES Crypting
    The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encryption of digital data. Its short length makes it too insecure for digital data and should not be used anymore.
  7. Encryption algorithms should be used with secure mode and padding scheme
    To secure your code using encryption algorithms, operation modes and padding schemes must be used correctly.
  1. Generic exceptions should not be ignored
    CATCH blocks should always have a proper catching mechanism with a meaningful exception handling.
  2. Hard coded IP address
    IP addresses are sensitive information that should never be exposed in production.
  3. Hard coded User Id / Password
    You should never hard code user credentials on the production to avoid security attacks and data leak.
  4. I/O function calls should not be vulnerable to path injection attacks
    I/O functions accepting data from users, they are prone to Injection attacks (URL parameters, POST data payloads, cookies). Building file system paths from such data may resolve to a path that should not be accessible to users.
  5. OS commands should not be vulnerable to injection attacks
    If the execution of operating system commands is allowed from user data, it can lead to command line injections, creating a serious threat to the underlying operating system.
  6. Regular expressions should not be vulnerable to Denial-of-Service attacks
    Building a regular expression pattern from a user data is highly unrecommended and leads to security threats.
  7. SHA-1 and Message-Digest hash algorithms should not be used in secure contexts
    The SHA-1 and Message-Digest algorithms should not be used anymore because they are too simple to crack by the attackers.
 

Why Perform Security Scan with Visual Expert

High-quality analysis

In-depth analysis of your PowerBuilder code based on 20+ years of experience.

Early Correction

Discover vulnerabilities at an early stage to reduce the risks and the remediation costs.

Rapid Remediation

Immediately identify the code to be changed thanks to Visual Expert tools.

Continous Integration

Visual Expert integrates with Jenkins to enable continuous integration.

 

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Visual Expert Features

200+ features to analyze and improve your PowerBuilder, Oracle and SQL Server code

Impact Analysis

Assess the impact of a change in your code

Estimate what you should modify to accomplish a change.
Don't break your application after a change!

  • If I change this variable, what is the effect on my code?
  • If I add a parameter to a function, what else is affected?
  • If a table or column is changed, which code should I update?
Visual Expert PowerBuilder Impact Analysis

Scan for Security Vulnerabilities

Identify and fix Security issues in your code:

  • Hard coded user id & passwords 
  • Hard coded IP addresses.
  • Vulnerabilities to Injections attacks
  • Fields access/protection issues
  • Improper/unsecured use of encryption
  • and more...

Check rules for Code Security

Review CRUD Operations in Your code
(Create, Read, Update, Delete)

Generate a CRUD matrix showing which programs access your data.

For instance, which DW or Procedures Create/Read/Update/Delete which Tables.

  • Review dependencies between database and PB applications.
  • Analyze the impact of changing your database Schema, for example changing a table definition or adding an index.
  • Estimate software complexity and development efforts.
  • Find out which table is never updated, deleted from multiple places, etc.
  • Make sure every process has at least one input (R) and one output (CUD).
Visual Expert PowerBuilder CRUD Matrix 

Generate Diagrams from your Code 

  • Visualize objects and dependencies.
  • Diagrams and source code are synchronized.
  • Select objects to generate a diagram

Visual Expert generates:

  • Data Model Diagram to document graphically database entities and their relationships. 
  • Impact Analysis Diagrams to find all references to a table, column, object, method, variable...
  • Call graphs to visualize chains of calls (multiple levels of references).
  • PBL dependency diagrams to visualize dependencies between PBLs


Visualize your code with diagrams

Explore Complex Chains of Calls

Display Call Trees: callers and callees for Functions and events.

Explore all possible execution paths.
Drill down in the code, click on referenced methods or variables to see their definitions.

Call trees help evaluate the effects of modifications to your code.

Visual Expert Call Trees

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Document your Code

Create reference manuals in HTML

Update your documentation on a regular basis (scheduled job).
Document the references in your code and navigate between these using hyperlinks.
Share knowledge with teammates.

 

PowerBuilder Documentation Tools 

Improve Code Quality

Cleanup the code. Streamline maintenance efforts. Avoid unexpected behavior.

  • Identify unused objects and remove some dead code.
  • Find empty methods, duplicated objects, oversized or uncommented scripts.
  • Calculate code metrics: lines of code, number of objects, methods, variables…
  • Check naming conventions.
  • Find objects that do not inherit from an ancestor etc.
  • You can check your code against hundreds of rules

Improve Code Performance

Find slow pieces of code. Remove Bottlenecks

  • Find the slowest procedures, functions, triggers
  • Reduce the time to access a given table
  • Break down the execution time of a large object into sub-queries or instructions.
  • Decompose the performance of a chain of calls
Identify Performance Issues in your DB Code

Code Comparison

Compare 2 versions of your DB or application:

  • View differences in a container hierarchy.
  • Drill down to find relevant changes.
  • Filter changes for a given object, or object type: Userobject, Table, Procedure...
  • Filter changes in a given PBL.
  • Save “snapshots” of your code on a regular basis, and compare them anytime.
  • And more...
PowerBuilder Code Comparison 

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Understand Complex Code

Explore the application structure. Understand its inner working.

When maintaining complex Applications, you may need to learn more about the code.
In such cases, Visual Expert is the perfect companion for PowerBuilder.

Navigate in your code via hyperlinks: each reference comes with a link to the referenced item.
Tooltips provide useful information about objects, methods and variables.
Explore inheritance dependencies between PB objects.
Lots of advanced feature will screen your code under various angles.

 

Catch a glimpse of Visual Expert

How it works?

Visual Expert Working

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Visual Expert Pricing & Editions

Pricing in Euro

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