Coverity announced the creation of the Coverity Security Library, an open source project available through GitHub and Maven to help developers easily fix cross-site scripting (XSS) security defects in Java web applications.


This project gives developers a free, simple, secure and well-tested library of escaping and encoding functions. This will enable developers to quickly plug some of the most common security holes that can lead to brand damaging and costly security breaches.

Providing actionable remediation guidance for developers to fix security defects is critical, but it quickly becomes difficult to implement fixes without a secure and convenient security library. Large Java libraries and frameworks like Apache Commons, Java EE and Spring provide bits and pieces of data escaping and encoding routines, but they are often incomplete and don’t cover all of the cases required for complex defects such as XSS.

The Coverity Security Library helps developers with limited security expertise quickly remediate security defects in Java web applications by providing a set of functions for data escaping and encoding. Arming developers with information to easily fix some of the most commonly exploited security defects in Java web applications with common development technologies like JSPs and Expression Language (EL) will help reduce the risk of application security attacks.

“Asking developers to write their own data escaping routines is a recipe for getting it wrong,” said Andy Chou, Coverity co-founder, CTO and head of the Security Research Laboratory. “The incomplete set of escapers in some libraries encourages developers to use the wrong ones. We need to empower developers to be part of the security solution with the right technologies and actionable information to help them fix defects quickly and without slowing them down. With the Coverity Security Library, developers now have a powerful and easy-to-use library to help them plug some of the most common security holes early in the development process when they are easiest to fix.”