Re: Strategies for teaching secure coding practices

[Jose Nazario <jose () monkey org>]

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Carl G. Alphonce wrote:

> I am a recent subscriber to this list and also an educator.  I teach
> primarily undergraduate courses, often the first and second semester
> courses, and I am very interested to hear from the list what you all
> consider to be important "secure coding" topics to cover in these
> first-year classes.

safe string handling routines. don't teach sprintf(), teach snprintf().
etc etc etc ... ignore unsafe routines in favor of teaching safe routines
as the default, and teach the caveats, too (sizeof() a pointer vs
strlen()). default to using u_int as a counter type (ie u_int i; for(i =
0; i < MAX_SIZE; i++) {...}).

these little things add up. you can't hope that anyone will ever do
anything long-term when you teach it as an afterthought.

have students audit eachothers code. have students test eachother's
applications (ie input letters into a calculator, what happens?).

> Also, what topics to you feel should be covered in an undergraduate
> curriculum but later than the first year?

analysis of existing designs, new designs with security in mind, auditing
techniques, etc ...

remember: security flaws are a subset of bugs where you introduce new (and
unexpected) functionality.

___________________________
jose nazario, ph.d.                     [EMAIL PROTECTED]
                                        http://monkey.org/~jose/
                                        http://infosecdaily.net/