The development of a secure coding standard for any programming language is a difficult undertaking that requires significant community involvement. The following development process has been used to create this standard:
- Rules and recommendations for a coding standard are solicited from the communities involved in the development and application of each programming language, including the formal or de facto standard bodies responsible for the documented standard.
- These rules and recommendations are edited by senior members of the CERT technical staff for content and style and placed on the CERT Secure Coding Standards web site for comment and review.
- The user community may then comment on the publically posted content using threaded discussions and other communication tools. Once a consensus develops that the rule or recommendation is appropriate and correct, the final rule is incorporated into an officially released version of the secure coding standard.
Drafts of the CERT C Programming Language Secure Coding Standard are reviewed by the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 international standardization working group for the C programming language and other industry groups as appropriate.