Fergie's Tech Blog

Websense: Googling for Security in Source Code

Via the Websense Security Labs Threat Blog.

Google has launched a new service to search for "publicly accessible source code". The service dubbed "Google Code Search" allows programmers to query for code using a myriad of syntax options i.e. regular expressions, exact strings, file types, packages and languages. One very cool feature of this new service is that google code search automatically extracts all files from archive files (zip, rar, etc), and makes it extremely easy to navigate and search through the extracted files.

Google has also released a Google Code Search Data API, so searching for code can be further automated.

There is no denying that this will help programmers everywhere when looking for examples of code and syntax, but from a research standpoint it will be interesting to see if this new feature can be used for purposes it was never intended for.

posted by Fergie @ 10/06/2006 02:54:00 PM