There are a number of tools used to detect security issues in a software application codebase. A simple and free one is flawfinder. A sophisticated commercial one is Veracode.  There’s also lint, pylint, findbugs for java, and xcode clang static analyzer.

Synopsis has bought a few tools like Coverity and Blackduck for various static checks on code and binary. Blackduck can do binary analysis and scores issues with the CVSS. A common use of Blackduck is for license checking to check for conformance to open source licenses.

A more comprehensive list of static code analysis tools is here.

Dynamic analysis tools inspect the running process and find memory and execution errors. Well known examples are valgrind and Purify. More dynamic tools are listed here.

For web application security there are protocol testing and fuzzing tools like Burp suite and Tenable Nessus.

A common issue with the tools is the issue of false positives. It helps to limit the testing to certain defect types or attack scenarios and identify the most critical issues, then expand the scope of types of defects.

Code obfuscation and anti-tamper are another line of tools, for example by Arxan, Klocwork, Irdeto and Proguard .

A great talk on Adventures in fuzzing. My takeaway has been that better ways of developing secure software are really important.