Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer

The next version of Perl::Critic has been shipped to CPAN and it includes built-in themes tied to the CERT guidelines for secure coding. CERT divides their guidelines into "rules" and "recommendations". You can activate the Perl::Critic policies that CERT suggests like this:

# Apply all "rules"
perlcritic --theme certrule  YourCode.pm

# Apply all "recomendations"

perlcritic --theme certrec YourCode.pm

# Apply both

perlcritic --theme 'certrule || certrec' YourCode.pm

These are not new policies -- we've just classified the existing policies that overlap with CERT's guidelines. Perl::Critic does not cover all the CERT guidelines, so I suggest visiting their site to see more ways to improve the security of your code.

Thanks to Kirk Kimmel for making this happen!