The CERT® Oracle® Secure Coding Standard for Java™

Chapter 1. Introduction

Software vulnerability reports and reports of software exploitations continue to grow at an alarming rate. A significant number of these reports result in technical security alerts. To address this growing threat to corporations, educational institutions, governments, and individuals, systems must be developed that are free of software vulnerabilities.

Coding errors cause the majority of software vulnerabilities. For example, 64 percent of the nearly 2,500 vulnerabilities in the National Vulnerability Database in 2004 were caused by programming errors [Heffley 2004].

Java is a relatively secure language. There is no explicit pointer manipulation; array and string bounds are automatically checked; attempts at referencing ...