Foreword

James A. Gosling

This set of Java^™ Coding Guidelines, a follow-on to the earlier The CERT^® Oracle^® Secure Coding Standard for Java^™, is invaluable. This book could almost be retitled Reliable Java^™ Coding Guidelines. One of the things that has struck me over the years is the interplay between reliability and security. There are all sorts of explicit security tools—cryptography, authentication, and others—but most break-ins are exploitations of bugs: coding that was badly done or that was insufficiently defensive. Building a reliable system is, in many ways, equivalent to building a secure system. The work you do in reliability pays off in security, and vice versa.

This book highlights the fact that security is not a feature; it is an attitude toward taking due care at every point. It should be a continuous part of every software engineer’s design thought process. It is organized around a list of guidelines. The meat of the book is the subtlety behind them. For example, “Store passwords using a hash function” appears to be a very basic and obvious point, and yet there are regular news articles about major data breaches just because some software engineer wasn’t thinking. Getting it right is tricky: there are a lot of details for the devil to hide in. This book is full of excellent guidance for dealing with those details.