Re: [SC-L] Where Does Secure Coding Belong In the Curriculum?
So many mistakes have been made in generations before mine that we are now trapped in a box of our own making that has us squabbling over academic minutiae like how to teach secure coding when we should not have to consider this topic at all - the code itself should be inherently secure. This is the comment that agrees with my own belief. When teaching how to program secure coding should be seen as inherent in this and not as some sort of optional add that is only required if the code is supposed to secure. Many of the techniques are just making the code more robust and this covers a considerable amount of the problems with code today. I see no reason that this shouldn't be taught as part of any programming course. Does this cover all secure coding, no of course not, but unless the foundations of secure implementation is inherent then more advance issues ar the least of the communities worries. Consider the environment before printing this mail. Thales e-Security Limited is incorporated in England and Wales with company registration number 2518805. Its registered office is located at 2 Dashwood Lang Road, The Bourne Business Park, Addlestone, Nr. Weybridge, Surrey KT15 2NX. The information contained in this e-mail is confidential. It may also be privileged. It is only intended for the stated addressee(s) and access to it by any other person is unauthorised. If you are not an addressee or the intended addressee, you must not disclose, copy, circulate or in any other way use or rely on the information contained in this e-mail. Such unauthorised use may be unlawful. If you have received this e-mail in error please delete it (and all copies) from your system, please also inform us immediately on +44 (0)1844 201800 or email postmas...@thales-esecurity.com. Commercial matters detailed or referred to in this e-mail are subject to a written contract signed for and on behalf of Thales e-Security Limited. ___ Secure Coding mailing list (SC-L) SC-L@securecoding.org List information, subscriptions, etc - http://krvw.com/mailman/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php SC-L is hosted and moderated by KRvW Associates, LLC (http://www.KRvW.com) as a free, non-commercial service to the software security community. ___
Re: [SC-L] Conditional Compile statements-- coding standards, and code review
Robert/Sean, It's a good question and one that I've never seen a really good answer to! Robert your option certain works but I feel that it somewhat prone to error if deployed on a large source base. So for example if a developer actually uses: #ifdef FRED # define MACRO(x) (x + 5) #endif ... then it's quite possible that this is missed by the review team and there is of course no guarantee that all code is reviewed manual. There is also the problem that there may be more than a single target release build for different variants i.e. it's not just a binary choice of release or debug versions. To make a more 'fool proof' mechanism I believe that it's better to have a more controlled use of which pre-processor directives are allowed for conditional compilation and ensure their use is consistent -- this is particular true of debug information which I believe causes the most problems. Following this approach would allow you to perform automatic searches for directives that are not on a defined white list. A word of warning this isn't as easy as it seems once you start getting statements of the following type -- this just re-enforces the problem of conditional compilation: #if defined c1 !(defined c2 || defined c3) ... #elif defined C4 ... #endif What would be really nice is to have an automatic tool that can check that for say build target A you can only have I, J and K defined but for not L and M -- using 3rd party code which is often designed to be ported to multiple targets sorting out what is actually used is not easy at all! Use should also looked at carefully to ensure that conditional compilation is only used where 'required'. So as an example do you really want all those call traces and information output used during development left in the code? In conclusion I believe that you should aim for as much automation as possible and also taking the problem out of the developer's hands. It's much easier to ensure that you've done something right once in your build system than expect every developer to do it right every time -- in my experience developers are happy to change what is in their 'local domain' but think about things a bit more carefully if they are making a change the can affect the entire development. Obviously these are just some ideas and I'm sure that there or other equally good solutions and as with all these things it does depend on what level of assurance you want otherwise you get the answer of don't allow conditional compilation! Consider the environment before printing this mail. Thales e-Security Limited is incorporated in England and Wales with company registration number 2518805. Its registered office is located at 2 Dashwood Lang Road, The Bourne Business Park, Addlestone, Nr. Weybridge, Surrey KT15 2NX. The information contained in this e-mail is confidential. It may also be privileged. It is only intended for the stated addressee(s) and access to it by any other person is unauthorised. If you are not an addressee or the intended addressee, you must not disclose, copy, circulate or in any other way use or rely on the information contained in this e-mail. Such unauthorised use may be unlawful. If you have received this e-mail in error please delete it (and all copies) from your system, please also inform us immediately on +44 (0)1844 201800 or email postmas...@thales-esecurity.com. Commercial matters detailed or referred to in this e-mail are subject to a written contract signed for and on behalf of Thales e-Security Limited. ___ Secure Coding mailing list (SC-L) SC-L@securecoding.org List information, subscriptions, etc - http://krvw.com/mailman/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php SC-L is hosted and moderated by KRvW Associates, LLC (http://www.KRvW.com) as a free, non-commercial service to the software security community. ___
