Sunday, September 28, 2008

Secure Coding Standards ...

I was (actually still am) looking for a comprehensive set of secure coding standards that I can implement for my development teams. Ideally, I would like to find a set of standards that
  • can be updated automatically/easily - that way, we are working to current recommendations
  • I can add our own specific recommendations without making the content upgrade difficult - for example, we have our own encoding routines
  • can be implemented internally - e.g., it comes as a web portal
  • is prescriptive and can be easily applied

    I would appreciate pointers to either publicly or commercially available sets. Here is the list so far
  • OWASP Development Guide and OWASP Backend Security Project - thanks to Bedirhan Urgun for the pointer
  • CERT Secure Coding Standards - thanks to Robert C. Seacord for the pointer
  • Joint Strike Force AV C++ Coding Standards and MISRA C Coding Standards - thanks to Robert C. Seacord for the pointer
  • OpenOffice C++ Coding Standards
  • Andrew van der Stock's Coding Standards - thanks to Jim Manico for pointer
  • Microsoft's MSDN Secure Coding Standards - thanks to Jim Manico for pointer

    Some other relevant sites include
  • DHS Build Security In
  • SANS Software Security Institute
  • CERT Top 10 Secure Coding Practices -
  • SANS GIAC Secure Software Programmer

    Hope you find this helpful. I plan to keep this list current.

    An0n S3c
  • 2 comments:

    Unknown said...

    We at Foundstone do offer such standards. Please refer to http://www.foundstone.com/us/services-software-policy-procedures-standards.asp for more details and contact us if interested. We look forward to helping you.

    Mike Ware said...

    Last year, I did a thesis that focused partly on mapping rules for writing secure Java code to secure design principles. I mainly covered core Java SE, but the list is fairly comprehensive. You can see my taxonomy here:

    A Taxonomy of Heuristics for Writing Secure Java Code