Simon Willison’s Weblog

Security and coding style

20th December 2002

A couple of good web development security resources:

• The Peon’s Guide To Secure System Development—why most software is insecure, why this is a bad thing and some sugestions for strategies to improve the situation.
• The Cross Site Scripting FAQ—Cross site scripting (where malicious users insert HTML / javascript in to your site in some way that allows them to steal cookies or cause other problems) is an issue that all web developers should understand. It is easy to defend against once you understand the problem.

I also found myself reading the Linux Kernel Coding Style document for some reason, and learnt some useful lessons about writing effective C (should I ever need to delve in to that language).