Writing secure applications takes a very scrutinous and pessimistic outlook on life.
Applications should be run with the principle of ``least privilege'' so that no process
is ever running with more than the bare minimum access that it needs to accomplish its
function. Previously tested code should be reused whenever possible to avoid common
mistakes that others may have already fixed.
One of the pitfalls of the UNIX® environment is how
easy it is to make assumptions about the sanity of the environment. Applications should
never trust user input (in all its forms), system resources, inter-process communication,
or the timing of events. UNIX processes do not execute
synchronously so logical operations are rarely atomic.
