Coding for high reliability/availability/security - what standards do I read? - security

Question

I've heard that the automotive industry has something called MISRA C.
What are the relevant standards for other high reliability/availability/security industries, such as
Space
Aircraft
Banking/financial
Automotive
Medical
Defense/Military
???
-Adam

Answer 1

Check out the Goddard Space Flight Center and its coding standards. One of the C standards, which I've adopted in my own code, is that headers must be self-contained, and they provide a simple way to enforce that -- a module's header must be the first file included in the module, so if the file is not self-contained, it won't compile.

Answer 2

if you're asking specifically about coding, the MISRA presents some guidelines for avoiding common mistakes in C.
however, there's a lot more to good software than coding. The "bible" of the aviation industry for sw development is DO-178B. It tells you what questions need to be addressed in the various design phases and how the answers should be documented. It's an ENORMOUS amount of paperwork, but if you're trying to keep planes in the air, you want the weakest point to be the human (pilot), not the software.

Answer 3

For programming high reliability systems in Ada, there is: ISO/IEC TR 15942:"Information technology — Programming languages — Guide for the use of the Ada programming language in high integrity systems":
Introduction
As a society, we are increasingly
reliant upon high integrity systems:
for safety systems (such as
fly-by-wire aircraft), for security
systems (to protect digital
information) or for financial systems
(e.g., cash dispensers). As the
complexity of these systems grows, so
do the demands for improved techniques
for the production of the software
components of the system. These high
integrity systems must be shown to be
fully predictable in operation and
have all the properties required of
them. This can only be achieved by
analysing the software, in addition to
the use of conventional dynamic
testing. There is, currently, no
mainstream high level language where
all programs in that language are
guaranteed to be predictable and
analysable. Therefore for any choice
of implementation language it is
essential to control the ways that the
language is used by the application.
The Ada language [ARM] is designed
with specific mechanisms for
controlling the use of certain aspects
of the language. Furthermore,
The semantics of Ada programs are well-defined, even in error
situations. Specifically, the effect
of a program can be predicted from the
language definition with few
implementation dependencies or
interactions between language
features.
The strong typing within the language can be used to reduce the
scope (and cost) of analysis to verify
key properties.
The Ada language has been successfully used on many high
integrity applications. This
demonstrates that validated Ada
compilers have the quality required
for such applications.
Guidance can be provided to facilitate the use of the language and
to encourage the development of tools
for further verification.
Ada is therefore ideally suited for
implementing high integrity software
and this document provides guidance in
the controls that are required on the
use of Ada to ensure that programs are
predictable and analysable.

Answer 4

You may find it instructive to look at some of the requirements of Carrier Grade Linux. While they (as the name suggests!) are specifying linux requirements, they are doing so for use in the high availability segment of telecommunications equipment.

Answer 5

FDA has General Principles of Software Validation, Design Control Guidance For Medical Device Manufacturers, Guidance for Industry, FDA Reviewers and Compliance on
Off-The-Shelf Software Use in Medical Devices, etc.

Answer 6

NIST provides a whole slew of related documents, you can dive in and peruse their work - but there is a lot of it, and it's all quite verbose, so I dont have a specific one to point you at.
If you want to be more specific with your needs, I might be able to narrow it down a bit...
In addition, Carnegie Mellon is pretty much the definitive when it comes to development processes for reliability, easy enough to find their standards but also quite verbose.
Also, specific industries often have their own standards, depending also on the country. For instance, credit card industry - PCI-DSS; Banking industry in EU - Basel II; Medical - HIPAA (though thats pretty high-level); anything US government related, various NIST docs; etc.