Introduction to security research. Find a CVE with CodeQL.

This tutorial will introduce fundamentals of security research and CodeQL when looking for security vulnerabilities in software. We'll share how to look for vulnerabilities in code and how to use static analysis to help us find sources, sinks and vulnerabilities.

Using an example of a vulnerability in an open source project that the speaker has found, CVE-2024-32022, we will walk through how we could detect it manually by reading code, learn how to write CodeQL, and by the end write a CodeQL query to find this vulnerability and its variants.

To workshop attendees:

Workshop repository is available at: https://gh.io/europython-codeql

To do before the workshop: install VS Code and set up the workshop repository following the instructions: https://github.com/sylwia-budzynska/codeql-workshop/?tab=readme-ov-file#option-a-local-installation. It should take 5-10 minutes.

If you can’t/don’t want to set up VS Code, you can create a codespace of the workshop repository which automatically downloads and installs everything we need for running CodeQL by following these instructions: https://github.com/sylwia-budzynska/codeql-workshop/?tab=readme-ov-file#option-b-github-codespace

During the workshop I will set up the codespace and do all the exercises together with you. The workshop materials have a lot of reference material, cheatsheets, etc. Don’t worry about it for now. It’s there for you to go back to during the hands-on session in case something wasn’t fully clear.