The development of a secure coding standard for any programming language is a difficult undertaking that requires significant community involvement. To produce standards of the highest possible quality, CERT is implementing the following development process:
- 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 in the Secure Coding area of CERT web site for comment and review [3].
- 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 the coding standard.
Various groups, including the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 international standardization working group for the C programming language have expressed an interest in supporting this model.