Facebook makes key Instagram security tool Pysa available to users

Facebook has formally open-sourced one of its secret security tools for Instagram that finds and fixes bugs. The tool called Pysa is now available on open-source repository GitHub.

Pysa is a security-focused tool built on top of Facebook’s type checker for Python called Pyre.

It’s used to look at code and analyse how data flows through it.

“We’ve made Pysa open source, together with many of the definitions required to help it find security issues, so that others can use the tool for their own Python code,” Facebook said in a statement on Friday.

“Analysing data flow is useful because many security and privacy issues can be modeled as data flowing into a place it shouldn’t”.