The C rules and recommendations in this wiki are a work in progress and reflect the current thinking of the secure coding community. Because this is a development website, many pages are incomplete or contain errors. As rules and recommendations mature, they are published in report or book form as official releases. These releases are issued as dictated by the needs and interests of the secure software development community.

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Front Matter 

 

Rules

Back Matter

  

Recommendations

 

There are two books available that cover C: one for rules and the other for guidelines. 

The CERT C Coding Standard provides rules to help programmers ensure that their code complies with the new C11 standard and earlier standards, including C99.  


Secure Coding in C and C++ identifies the root causes of today's most widespread software vulnerabilities, shows how they can be exploited, reviews the potential consequences, and presents secure alternatives.

SCALe offers conformance testing of C  language software systems against the CERT C Secure Coding Standard.

Contact us if you

  • have questions about the Secure Coding wiki
  • have recommendations for standards in development
  • want to request privileges to participate in standards development

We acknowledge the contributions of the following folks, and we look forward to seeing your name here as well.  

Link to guidelines using the Tiny Link under Tools→Link to this Page... (This URL will not change if the name of the guideline changes.)   

  • To eliminate a section from the lists above, label it section and void.
  • To have a section listed as a recommendation, label it section and recommendation.
  • To have a section listed as a rule, label it section and rule.