Static analysis is a powerful technique for finding vulnerabilities in source code. However, the approach has suffered from being noisy - that is, many static analysis tools find quite a few “vulnerabilities” that are not actually real. This has led to developer friction as users get tired of the tools “crying wolf” one time too many.

The motivation for GoKart was to address this: could we create a scanner with significantly lower false positive rates than existing tools? Based on our experimentation the answer is yes.

See also: npm audit and the shortcomings of security-focused static analysis tools.