Job Openings @ Cigital

Cigital currently has 29 different openings across different locations.  We are actively recruiting for, with critical needs in Texas, London,  and Managing Consultant areas.  You’ll find detailed descriptions for these on our website. Leave a comment here, and I can send you an email to get your resume.

Sr. Software Engineer  - Dulles

Technical Manager -  Santa Clara

 

Security Consultant  - London

Managing Consultant – Chicago, Dallas, London, New York, Santa Clara, Toronto

Sales Director – Houston

Associate Consultants - Bloomington, Boston, Dulles and New York

Interns - Bloomington, Boston, Dulles and New York

Security Consultants - Boston, Dulles, London, Minneapolis

Sr. Security Consultant  - Dulles, London and Santa Clara

Software Engineer - Dulles

Beware : Yahoo Signin Alert

I received the following email at my yahoo account. Having seen these kinds of email quite a lot, I immediately knew it was an email someone was sending to compromise my account. Glad it helps when you are working for a company like "Cigital".

Beware of the email, which looks like this:

Make sure you don't click on the link, or login into your account using the link provided there.

Fortify – [error]: Build ID doesn’t exist.

[error]: Build ID doesn’t exist.Error invoking sourceanalyzer. Exit code: 1.
This was the strange error we kept seeing today on the Jenkins server when using Fortify to scan projects. All the jobs which were running successfully failed miserably.

Even having the source code for the Maven plug-in didn’t help much.

 Spent a few hours trying various things, and at one point I decided to just run the translate command. The translate was running fine, which made me wonder that something isn’t right here.
Fortify kept complaining that the Build ID doesn’t exist. Translate also requires the use of Build ID which made we wonder something was going wrong. When I just ran the translate, and looked at the log file it generates, the culprit was hidden there. “No space left on device”. See screen shot below:

Fortify was configured to use the default working directory and project root. The disk was full, and translate didn’t throw an exception. The stack trace was hidden in the log file. Once the default working folder was changed, all jobs started running successfully.
There are basically two options available:
1. Change the values to a mount which has more space.
com.fortify.WorkingDirectory=/your/tmp/dir/fortify
com.fortify.sca.ProjectRoot=/your/tmp/dir/fortify
2. Use the Jenkins workspace folder, so you can clear the workspace at regular intervals
com.fortify.WorkingDirectory=.yourjenkinsworkspace
com.fortify.sca.ProjectRoot=.yourjenkinsworkspace

Maven Fortify Plugin - Getting Help

Developers and security analysts have trouble getting the Fortify Maven plugin up and running. Even if the basic commands for translate, and scan work, I have seen them having trouble understanding the various options available to configure how the projects gets scanned.

Adding the Fortify Maven plugin is as simple as adding the following lines to your POM file. This is again optional, and in many cases if you specify the full path, you don't even have to add the following lines to all your POM.

If you don't have the source for the Plugin and you want to find out what are the configuration options which can be specified for the plugin, use the mvn help:describe command. If you want to see the options for the maven-sca-plugin shown above, use the following command:
mvn help:describe -DgroupId=com.fortify.ps.maven.plugin -DartifactId=maven-sca-plugin -Dversion=3.50 -Ddetail=true -Doutput=mvn-help.txt

The text file would have all the detailed information available to use with the goals.

To get help information for a specifc MOJO or a Maven goal use the following command:
mvn help:describe -DgroupId=com.fortify.ps.maven.plugin -DartifactId=maven-sca-plugin -Dversion=3.50 -Ddetail=true -Dgoal=scan -Doutput=mvn-help-scan.txt

jmap & Windows7

In spite of using Java for several decades now, I had never used jmap. jmap is a JDK tool used for dumping the heap memory details of a process. jmap worked with no problems at all on the Ubuntu machine which had OpenJDK installed.

However, as soon as I tried using the same commands on my Windows 7 machine, the command just didn't do anything. I did search online and found no references on why it doesn't work the way it is supposed to on Windows. Didn't spend too much time finding what the root cause was either. The workaround is sufficient for me. :)

So, lets see how to get this jmap working on Windows.

Step 1:
Open a command window and start any Java program you have. Make sure it runs for a while so you can use this process ID to get the heap dump.

Step 2:
Run the jps command to get the process ID's. jps is the Java Virtual Machine Process Status Tool.

Step 3:
Now that you have the process ID's for the applications running, start the jmap command on another command prompt. This is where things get interesting.

 

jmap should have worked here, since it is in the path. However, it doesn't dump the heap and keeps displaying the usage instructions.

I tried several options, none seemed to work.

Step 4:

At this point, I decided to run the jmap command from the bin folder of the JDK to see if anything changes.

And like a charm, jmap dumped the contents of the heap.

Step 5:
Once you have the contents of the heap, use jhat the Java Heap Analysis Tool to view and browse through the heap dump file.

Below are links for the various JDK Tools:

1. jmap
2. jps
3. jhat

SONAR Ant Task

I am using Sonar for code analysis. While writing some custom Ant build scripts for SONAR since we have an Ant task now, I was constantly seeing the following error message. I followed the steps listed on Sonar here:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/SONAR/Analyzing+with+Sonar+Ant+Task 

The build file I created was as such:

However, every time I tried the task I kept getting the following exception:

A small change in the build file, and the Analysis ran like a charm: