SAN FRANCISCO: 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 analyze how data flows through it, IANS reported.

“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”.

According to the company, Pysa detected 44 percent of all security bugs in Instagram’s server-side Python code in the first half of this year.

(With inputs from agencies)