secure-coding.md

🛡️ Secure Coding Playbook

🎯 Objective

Provide practical coding guidelines to reduce software implementation vulnerabilities in C-family languages.

✅ Best Practices

• Always validate input length (avoid gets, scanf without size).
• Use safe string functions (strncpy, snprintf).
• Apply memory bounds checks for arrays and buffers.
• Initialize all pointers and variables before use.
• Free allocated memory once only and set pointer to NULL.

🔧 Compiler & Tooling

• Enable compiler flags: -Wall -Wextra -Wformat -fstack-protector-all
• Use static analyzers: clang-tidy, cppcheck
• Apply runtime checkers: ASAN, Valgrind

🛡️ Defenses in Depth

• Enable ASLR, DEP/NX, stack canaries
• Prefer memory-safe libraries (e.g., libsafe)
• Regular code audits & fuzzing