This book provides a set of design and implementation guidelines for writing secure programs for Linux and Unix systems. Such programs include application programs used as viewers of remote data, web applications (including CGI scripts), network servers, and setuid/setgid programs. Specific guidelines for C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, TCL, and Ada95 are included.

This book describes a set of design and implementation guidelines for writing secure programs on Linux and Unix systems. For purposes of this book, a “secure program” is a program that sits on a security boundary, taking input from a source that does not have the same access rights as the program. Such programs include application programs used as viewers of remote data, web applications (including CGI scripts), network servers, and setuid/setgid programs. This book does not address modifying the operating system kernel itself, although many of the principles discussed here do apply. These guidelines were developed as a survey of “lessons learned” from various sources on how to create such programs (along with additional observations by the author), reorganized into a set of larger principles. This book includes specific guidance for a number of languages, including C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, TCL, and Ada95.

This book does not cover assurance measures, software engineering processes, and quality assurance approaches, which are important but widely discussed elsewhere. Such measures include testing, peer review, configuration management, and formal methods. Documents specifically identifying sets of development assurance measures for security issues include the Common Criteria [CC 1999] and the System Security Engineering Capability Maturity Model [SSE-CMM 1999]. More general sets of software engineering methods or processes are defined in documents such as the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model for Software (SE-CMM), ISO 9000 (along with ISO 9001 and ISO 9001-3), and ISO 12207.

This book does not discuss how to configure a system (or network) to be secure in a given environment. This is clearly necessary for secure use of a given program, but a great many other documents discuss secure configurations. An excellent general book on configuring Unix-like systems to be secure is Garfinkel [1996]. Other books for securing Unix-like systems include Anonymous [1998].

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