At the Black Hat Europe conference, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie, said that secure software holds the key for IT security. In order to write secure software, he advised programmers to keep three rules in mind. “First you have to know what you have to do,” he said. In other words, developers who clearly understand the purpose of their applications will be able to do a better job of writing secure code.
Second, Diffie told developers to “write good code.” However, he acknowledge that writing good code is a complicated process and poor programming languages can sometimes be an obstacle.
Third, “all good code is expensive,” he said. Companies must be willing to spend some money if they want their developers to produce secure code.
