Coverity Initiates Academic Program With Carnegie Mellon, Purdue and Stanford Universities
Source Code Analysis Firm Works With Top Tier Educational Institutions to Help Solve Urgent Problems Caused by Lack of Software Security

SAN FRANCISCO, September 18, 2006 – Coverity, Inc., maker of the world's most advanced source code analysis solution, today announced the Coverity University Outreach Program to better educate the next generation of software engineers. Coverity is initially working with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Purdue University and Stanford University, and intends to expand the program to other universities and colleges in the future. Under the program, students will learn best practices for writing clean, secure code with the help of source code analysis. Coverity will provide technology to computer science professors and students at these universities, which will help them quickly analyze code during the development process to pinpoint potential defects and security vulnerabilities.

This new educational program is part of a larger initiative by Coverity to cooperate with academic and government research institutions to deal with the urgent problems caused by a lack of quality in software. A number of factors including rapid increases in software project size and complexity, the lack of adequate security training for engineers, the growth of outsourcing and shorter development timetables, have caused a rapid increase in the number of costly security vulnerabilities and software defects in the last five years.

Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance (CERIAS) is helping to solve this problem through research and education in areas of information security that are crucial to the protection of critical computing and communication infrastructure.

“We are pleased to be able to equip our teaching lab with Coverity Prevent because it is a leading source code analysis solution,” said Gene Spafford, professor of computer science at Purdue. “As the average piece of code balloons in both size and complexity, it is critical that the software engineers involved employ strong methods to prevent errors that can lead to faulty implementations. We really value when vendors such as Coverity work with us to help educate our students about creating reliable software.”

“I teach my students that static analysis tools are becoming an indispensable part of any quality assurance strategy,” said Jonathan Aldrich, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. “The masters students in my class were uniformly impressed with the Coverity technology, noting a very low false positive rate, good scalability and usefulness of the errors found. Using these tools gives them a taste of what is available in the marketplace today and better prepares them to be effective leaders in the software companies where they will someday work.”

Under the terms of the agreements, computer science students at CMU, Purdue, and Stanford can use Coverity Prevent for educational research and instruction. The students also provide feedback on the technology, which Coverity uses to ensure that its software stays effective and easy to use for the everyday developer.

“Coverity maintains strong ties with numerous educational institutions as part of our effort to advance the state of the art in software development,” said Dr. Andy Chou, chief scientist and cofounder of Coverity. “These students represent the next generation of computer scientists and we're excited to have this opportunity to help them learn how to build security into their future software products.”

Coverity's University Outreach Program is for “classroom use,” which includes use by university students on their class projects, or as part of a lecture. For more information, please contact the program directors by email at UniversityOutreach@coverity.com

About Coverity
Coverity (www.coverity.com), maker of the most advanced source code analysis solution, is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco. Coverity's groundbreaking technology removes the barriers to writing and delivering complex software by automatically finding critical software defects and security vulnerabilities as the software is written. More than 100 leading companies choose Coverity because it scales to tens of millions of lines of code, has the lowest false positive rate and provides 100 percent path coverage. Companies like Juniper Networks, Symantec/VERITAS, McAfee, Synopsys, NASA, Palm and Wind River work with Coverity's tools to eliminate security and quality defects from their mission-critical code and make their products Coverity Clean.

Coverity is a registered trademark, and Coverity Extend and Coverity Prevent are trademarks of Coverity, Inc. All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contacts

Craig Oda
Page One PR for Coverity
coda@pageonepr.com
+1 650-565-9800 x702

Russ Wood
Director, Corporate Marketing
rwood@coverity.com
+1 415-694-5304

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