Software Security - PREfast project

Installing PREfast

Due to possible license restrictions, the link to the PREfast archive to install it will be posted in Brightspace.

PREfast is included in some (but not all) versions of Visual Studio. But because Visual Studio is a huge download,of several GB and the version of PREfast and the syntax used varies between Visual Studio versions, we provide two simple ways to use PREfast from the command line:

from the Windows command line
from the Linux command line using wine

It is not so pretty using the tool on the command line - an IDE is of course nicer to work with - but it is very simple and reliable.

Windows command line

To use, just unzip the archive in some directory. Open a Command Prompt or PowerShell and navigate to the directory. Then just run prefast.bat to run PREfast over the exercise file, or prefast.bat FILENAME if you renamed the exercise file.

Wine on Linux command line (historic)

Not sure how well this still works; just installing Windows in a VM and then following the instructions above, or using a Windows machine in any of the terminal rooms in Huygens or borrowing a laptop in the library in Huygens, is probably much easier.

PREfast can run on Unix/Linux using wine. Install wine using your systems package manager or download and install it manually from its website.

Unpack the TAR.GZ archive - the link is on Brightspace. Now, on the command-line go to this directory and use ./prefast to check the exercise file or ./prefast FILENAME if you renamed the file.

Wine may (will?) complain about a non-existent directory C:\users\pim\Temp. To fix that

Edit 'dotwine/user.reg' and change the occurrences of 'pim' string to your Linux user name. The lines 148 and 149 are those setting the environment variable for your TEMP directory, which must exist for the compiler 'cl.exe' to run.
or: you could try making a symlink YOUR_PREFAST_DIR/dotwine/drive_c/users/pim, where YOUR_PREFAST_DIR is your PREfast directory, and make this link poins to YOUR_PREFAST_DIR/dotwine/drive_c/users/YOUR_LINUX_USERNAME/
or: create a directory named 'Temp' under 'dotwine/drive_c/users/pim/'. You can use command 'mkdir -p dotwine/drive_c/users/pim/Temp' by running it under the 'PREfast_v9.0_under_wine' directory

One student reported that they had install the msxml3 library (using winetricks and a customized prefix pointing to the "dotwine" directory).