Software Scan

The President's Column

This month S.A.F.E. has released version 4.7 of CodeSuite that contains a lot of great new features. I talk about them in the Scanning Tools section of this newsletter. In the Scanning IP section of the newsletter I'm putting in a plug for my friend and colleague Gene Quinn's blog called IP Watchdog, a great resource for news and opinion about IP that's up for a prestigious award. And you get to vote.

Send me your comments and critiques. I'm always interested in hearing from you.

Regards,


Bob Zeidman
President, SAFE Corporation

Scanning Tools

S.A.F.E. Releases CodeSuite 4.7

Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering has just released a new version of CodeSuite that has some really great new features.

PID spreadsheets

What's a PID? It's a partial identifier. Or more specifically, a partially matching identifier. That's where two identifiers in code almost match. So for example, the identifiers identifier1 and confident_boy share the partial identifier (or "PID") ident. CodeMatch has always been able to correlate PIDs and use that in calculating the identifier correlation score as a component of the entire correlation score between two source code files. But there can be so many PIDs that users got blurry-eyed trying to view them all and find suspicious ones in a CodeMatch HTML report.

So we came up with a solution. You can now export the PIDs from a CodeSuite database into a spreadsheet. You can see not only the PIDs, but the original identifiers that share the PIDs. Now you can sort and select, cut and paste, and generally look for clues to copying in a simple spreadsheet.

FileIdentify™

Part of our process for finding copying has been to first find all the source code files in a directory of files so that you know what to examine. However, there are lots of source code files, and some can be missed. Some programming languages are a bit uncommon and you may not recognize the source code files. Well, we found a solution to that too. The new FileIdentify function of CodeSuite allows you to point at a folder and generate a spreadsheet containing all of the file extensions in that folder and all subfolders. If CodeSuite recognizes the (potential) programming language, it will put that information in the spreadsheet too.

XML

From the beginning of CodeSuite, when there was only CodeMatch, the database has always been a fully documented text file that anyone can view. This allows our customers to make their own tools to extract data and statistics from a CodeSuite comparison, and some customers have created some very interesting utilities. Our database format was simple, but grew more complex over the years. Now we have a function in CodeSuite that converts any CodeSuite database into XML so that you can use off-the-shelf tools to examine it, translate it, or write utilities to extract data and statistics.

CodeSuite^® & CodeSuite-LT^®
Sophisticated sets of tools for analyzing software source code and object code including:

BitMatch^®
Check binary object code for plagiarism.

CodeCLOC^®
Measure software IP changes between versions of a program.

CodeCross^®
Cross check source code for plagiarism.

CodeDiff^®
Compare source code to find differences and measure changes.

CodeMatch^®
The premiere tool for pinpointing copied source code.

SourceDetective^®
Scour the Internet for plagiarized code.

CodeSuite-MP^®
Speed up your analysis on a multiprocessor system.

CodeGrid^®
Turbo charge your analysis on a supercomputer grid.

HTML Preprocessor™
Divide HTML pages into their basic elements for easier analysis.

Get Smart

SAFE offers training at our facility or yours or on the Web. Contact us to make arrangements:

MCLE credit in software IP

CodeSuite certification

Your New Office

Remember that you can now have your own secure office at the SAFE facility for storing proprietary software, running CodeSuite, analyzing the results, and getting onsite support. We're located at

20863 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Suite 456
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 517-1167

Scanning IP

Vote for IP Watchdog

If you want to get up-to-date information on the world of intellectual property, and you want it to be interesting, passionate (yes, some people are passionate about IP) and sometimes even controversial (yes, IP can also provoke fiery controversy), then you definitely need to sign up for Gene Quinn's IP Watchdog blog.

IP Watchdog is considered one of the most influential IP blogs in cyberspace. In fact, the American Bar Association runs a poll each year to rank the best law blogs, and IP Watchdog usually comes out on top or near the top for IP blogs. But as they say on DWTS, you need to vote! There's no guarantee that your celebrity will win. So I'm asking you to vote for IP Watchdog in the ABA blawg 100 competition. Go here to vote and look for IP Watchdog in the... where else?... IP category.