SAMATE Reference Dataset

Through the  news we can become alerted to many interesting things and one of the recent useful bits is the SAMATE Reference Dataset built by NIST Software Assurance Metrics And Tool Evaluation project. Should you need information on common vulnerabilities test cases, the database has more than 80,000 test cases by now.

From the project website:

The purpose of the SAMATE Reference Dataset (SRD) is to provide users, researchers, and software security assurance tool developers with a set of known security flaws. This will allow end users to evaluate tools and tool developers to test their methods. These test cases are designs, source code, binaries, etc., i.e. from all the phases of the software life cycle. The dataset includes “wild” (production), “synthetic” (written to test or generated), and “academic” (from students) test cases. This database will also contain real software application with known bugs and vulnerabilities. The dataset intends to encompass a wide variety of possible vulnerabilities, languages, platforms, and compilers. The dataset is anticipated to become a large-scale effort, gathering test cases from many contributors

Isn’t it good when you do not need to reinvent the wheel?