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Welcome to CERT
New Publications
- SQUARE Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Using Malware Analysis to Identify Overlooked Security Requirements (MORE)
- Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats, 5th Edition
- Best Practices for Preventing and Responding to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks
- The Critical Role of Positive Incentives for Reducing Insider Threats
About CERT
Our mission at the CERT Division is to anticipate and solve the nation's cybersecurity challenges.
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Secure Coding
Secure Coding in Java Professional Certificate Now Available
Our certificate programs, one for Java and the other for C and C++, enable software developers to eliminate security vulnerabilities before products ship.
Secure Coding
Fall 2016 Edition of the Secure Coding Newsletter
The team discusses changes it plans to make to accounts on the Secure Coding wiki and announces news related to SEI CERT Standard publications.
Secure Coding
SEI CERT C Coding Standard (2016) Released
The latest edition, available for free, promotes secure coding standards and complements our newly developed Secure Coding in C and C++ Professional Certificate.
Secure Coding
Research into API Usability and Security
We're studying how to design APIs that are usable by programmers for developing secure code.
Secure Coding
Compiler-Enforced Buffer Overflow Elimination
The Compiler-Enforced Buffer Overflow Elimination tool is a research prototype that prevents buffer overflows in multithreaded code and has additional features not found in other memory safety mechanisms.
Secure Coding
Secure Coding in C and C++ Course
We offer this four-day course to help you identify and prevent common programming errors in C and C++, plus understand how these errors can lead to code that is vulnerable to exploitation.
Secure Coding
CERT Is Hiring
Your top-notch skills and knowledge can help us make a difference in our nation’s cybersecurity. Explore our career opportunities today.
Secure Coding
SEI Book Series in Software Engineering
Our SEI researchers write books covering software engineering topics for this series of books published by Addison-Wesley Professional.
Our Mission: We reduce the number of vulnerabilities to a level that can be fully mitigated in operational environments. This reduction is accomplished by preventing coding errors or discovering and eliminating security flaws during implementation and testing.
The CERT Division has been extremely successful in the development of secure coding standards, which have been adopted at corporate levels by companies such as Cisco and Oracle, and the development of the Source Code Analysis Laboratory (SCALe), which supports conformance testing of systems against these coding standards. The success of the secure coding standards and SCALe contributed to the impetus for including software assurance requirements in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2013.
Eliminating vulnerabilities during development can result in a two to three orders-of-magnitude reduction in the total cost of repairing the code versus making the repairs afterwards. To achieve these goals, it is necessary to determine how to develop verifiably secure code within budget and on schedule.
We research secure coding.
We do research and development to create tools to support creation of secure code right from the start, and analytical tools to detect code vulnerabilities. We also work with the software development and security communities to research and develop secure coding standards for commonly used programming languages and for smartphone platforms (Android, iOS, Win8).
We participate in international standards development.
We participate in the development of international standards for programming languages to improve the security of these languages.
We provide SCALe conformance testing services.
We assess whether your software conforms to CERT secure coding standards through our Source Code Analysis Laboratory (SCALe).Engage with Us
Help inform our research. Share what has worked for you, or let us know if you need support from our team.
News & Announcements
- 10/17/2016 CMU and SEI’s CERT Division to Host Fall ISO/IEC International C Programming Language Standards Committee Experts from the CERT Secure Coding Team continue ongoing efforts to enhance security in the C programming language standard.
Publications & Media
- 12/09/2016 Fall 2016 Edition of the Secure Coding Newsletter The team discusses changes it plans to make to accounts on the Secure Coding wiki and announces news related to SEI CERT Standard publications.
- 12/07/2016 Avoiding Insecure C++ This presentation introduces the SEI CERT C++
- 12/06/2016 SEI Education and Training Catalog This catalog describes SEI training and certificates that help you tackle today's software, systems, and cybersecurity challenges.
- 11/30/2016 Construction and Implementation of CERT Secure Coding Rules Improving Automation of Secure Coding This presentation describes the need for secure coding standards, which help reduce vulnerabilities due to programming errors.
- 11/10/2016 From Secure Coding to Secure Software In this webinar, we discussed how you can improve your organization's secure coding capabilities.
Most Recent Blog Post
SEI CERT C Coding Standard (2016 Edition)
This online download is available for free to promote the adoption of secure coding standards. This latest edition complements our newly developed Secure Coding in C and C++ Professional Certificate.
Our new certificate programs, one for C and C++ the other for Java, enable software developers to eliminate security vulnerabilities before products ship.
In our recently restructured and redesigned wiki, members of the community can work with us to develop new secure coding rules and recommendations for the C, C++, Java, and Perl languages.
Source Code Analysis Laboratory (SCALe)
SCALe consists of commercial, open source, and experimental analysis that we use to analyze C and Java language software systems against the CERT C Secure Coding Standard and the CERT Oracle Secure Coding Standard for Java.
New versions of DidFail, a tool detects potential leaks of sensitive information in Android apps, are available. The most recent enhancements to DidFail are described in the technical report
Java Coding Guidelines Available Free Online
We have made the Java coding guidelines available online both to promote more widespread adoption of secure coding standards and as a thank you to the software security and software development communities that have collaborated with us to make secure coding initiatives a success.
Clang Thread Safety Analysis Tool
Google and the CERT Secure Coding Initiative developed Clang Thread Safety Analysis, a tool that uses annotations to declare and enforce thread safety policies in C and C++ programs.
Performance of Compiler-Assisted Memory Safety Checking
In this new SEI technical note, the authors describe the criteria for deploying a compiler-based memory safety checking tool and the performance that can be achieved with two such tools whose source code is freely available.
DidFail Tool
The DidFail tool uses static analysis to detect potential leaks of sensitive information within a set of Android apps.
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