Bearer vs Joern

Bearer CLI is a free static application security testing tool for Linux and macOS. It scans source code and analyzes data flows to identify security and privacy risks while analyzing code patterns instead of viewing actual data values. The tool supports more than 120 sensitive data types, including personal data, PII, and PHI. Privacy reports can show sensitive data, related data subjects, and internal or third-party components that process it, with information useful for GDPR records of processing activities. Security features include SAST rules and a separate hard-coded-secrets scanner. Bearer documents pull-request and CI/CD use with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and CircleCI, plus custom security rules. Listed stacks include Go, Python, PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Java. Installation options include scripts, Homebrew, Linux package managers, Docker, and binaries. macOS 12 or later and Git 2.34 or later are required.

Joern analyzes source code, bytecode and binary code for vulnerability discovery and static program analysis research. It converts programs into code property graphs, providing a common structure for cross-language analysis. Users query those graphs with a strongly typed, extensible Scala-based domain-specific language. Features include parsing, taint analysis, search queries and passes that extend the graph representation. Joern Scan runs predefined queries and reports matching issues with their locations; queries can be selected by tag or name, and community contributions are accepted in the default database. Queries can be wrapped into custom scanners for CI. Joern also works as a library or through REST and HTTP APIs, including a server for graph construction and querying. Documented frontends cover C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, PHP, Python, Ruby, Swift, x86/x64 and JVM bytecode, with varying maturity. Distributions target Linux, macOS and Windows on x86_64 and ARM64. Joern is free, Apache-2.0 licensed and requires JDK 21.