This secure coding standard consists of rules and recommendations. Coding practices are defined to be rules when all of the following conditions are met:
- Violation of the coding practice will result in a security flaw that may result in an exploitable vulnerability.
- There is a denumerable set of conditions for which violating the coding practice is necessary to ensure correct behavior.
- Conformance to the coding practice can be determined through automated analysis, formal methods, or manual inspection
techniques.
Conformance to secure coding rules must be demonstrated to claim compliance with this standard unless an exceptional condition exists. If an exceptional condition is claimed, the exception must correspond to a predefined exceptional condition and the application of this exception must be documented in the source code.
Recommendations are guidelines or suggestions. Coding practices are defined to be recommendations when all of the following conditions are met:
- Application of the coding practice is likely to improve system security.
- One or more of the requirements necessary for a coding practice to be considered a rule cannot be met.
Compliance with recommendations is not necessary to claim compliance with this standard. It is possible, however, to claim compliance with recommendations (especially in cases in which compliance can be verified). The set of recommendations that a particular development effort adopts depends on the security requirements of the final software product. Projects with high-security requirements can dedicate more resources to security and are thus likely to adopt a larger set of recommendations.
Implementation of the secure coding rules defined in this standard are necessary (but not sufficient) to ensure the security of software systems developing in the C programming languages.
The following graph shows the number and breakdown of rules and recommendations for the CERT C Programming Language Secure Coding standard:
Key: Blue -- recommendations Red -- rules