drek is a static-code-analysis tool that can be used to perform security-focused code reviews. It enables an auditor to swiftly map the attack-surface of a large application, with an emphasis on identifying development anti-patterns and footguns.

Much like grep, drek scans a codebase for user-defined regular-expressions. Unlike grep, drek outputs its results into an ergonomic html report that allows for sorting, filtering, and annotating of points-of-interest.

drek is the successor to watchtower (project, article).

drek can be installed via npm:

[sudo] npm install -g drek

Scan the codebase at /path/to/app for the signatures contained within /path/to/signatures/*.yml:

drek /path/to/app -s '/path/to/signatures/*.yml' -p 'My App' > ./drek-report.html

The following are reports on the Damn Vulnerable Web Application:

• Interactive HTML report (save the file and open it locally)
• PDF report

drek can output points-of-interest as csv, html, json, or xml, though the html report is the primary use-case.

The html report allows auditors to do the following:

• Categorize each point-of-interest by "severity".
• Filter points-of-interest by severity and filetype.
• Save annotations to localStorage.
• Export a PDF to share audit results.

drek can be configured to scan for any user-defined regular-expressions on a per-filetype basis via signature files.

Signature files are yml files that conform to a simple schema. See the drek-signatures repository for a collection of example signature files.

drek may optionally be configured via a ~/.drekrc file (example) as parsed by rc. It accepts the following values: