Software Pedigree Check for Small Companies

by Kevin Morris

It’s kind of a given these days that any major software project will contain more than just homegrown code. At the very least, it’s likely to have open-source bits and pieces in there. It’s Protecode’s business to provide tools to companies so that they can manage their code and know all of the licensing obligations and security issues.

But what if you’re a small company and, for instance, someone is looking at investing or buying you and wants to know the pedigree of your software for the purposes of due diligence? That sort of one-off lower-cost assessment is what’s behind Protecode’s just-announced QuickAudit service.

With this service, users upload their code to Protecode’s servers; the check is run in an automated fashion, and the result is an audit report detailing all of the contents, copyrights, and licenses along with an optional license obligation report.

Protecode’s experience is that there hasn’t been much pushback on uploading software to their servers; maybe 1 in 10 will object. In those cases, Protecode engages in a certification service project with them, and someone goes onsite to install the tool and manage things. Taking one to three weeks, this obviously costs more than the few thousand dollars for the simple automated online audit.

You can find more info on their release…

Product Update: PVT Monitor IP

The Cryptography Handbook

Sponsored by Maxim Integrated

The Cryptography Handbook is designed to be a quick study guide for a product development engineer, taking an engineering rather than theoretical approach. In this series, we start with a general overview and then define the characteristics of a secure cryptographic system. We then describe various cryptographic concepts and provide an implementation-centric explanation of physically unclonable function (PUF) technology. We hope that this approach will give the busy engineer a quick understanding of the basic concepts of cryptography and provide a relatively fast way to integrate security in his/her design.

Click here to download the whitepaper

Featured Chalk Talk

Hello FPGA

Sponsored by Mouser Electronics and Microchip

Getting started on an FPGA-based embedded vision project can be tricky. Locating all the components you need, getting them to talk to each other, and just getting your system to the video equivalent of “Hello World” is a pretty daunting task. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton chats with Avery Williams of Microchip Technology about the Hello FPGA kit - a low-cost, low-touch embedded vision kit for engineers new to FPGAs.

More information about Microchip Technology Hello FPGA Kit

Software Pedigree Check for Small Companies

Related