What secure coding evidence should teams keep for NIST SSDF SP 800-218?
Start with the organization's requirements and the practices appropriate to the development languages and environment. PW.5.1 covers creating source code with those practices. PW.7 covers human-readable code review or analysis, and PW.8 covers executable-code testing when the organization determines those activities are needed.
Keep the records that demonstrate those decisions and results: the applicable coding standard or checklist; the covered repository, component, commit, build, or release; reviewer or tool identity and configuration; findings and recommended remediations; triage status; fixes and retest results; and the rationale and approver for any accepted exception. Training records can support PO.2.2 when role-based training is part of the implementation, but training alone does not show that a release followed secure coding practices.
PO.3.3 recommends configuring tools to generate artifacts defined by the organization. The evidence may be a pull-request record, issue, scan result, test report, signed workflow event, or another protected record. It should be traceable to the software decision it supports rather than collected as an unlinked screenshot.
- Requirements owner: identify the secure coding practices and security-check criteria that apply to the language, environment, product risk, and release.
- Development team: retain the code change, review discussion, analysis or test result, and resulting remediation.
- Security or designated reviewer: record triage, severity or priority under the organization's criteria, false-positive decisions, and approved exceptions.
- Release decision-maker: link unresolved findings and risk responses to the affected release; SP 800-218 does not supply a universal blocking severity.
- Process owner: protect the evidence from unauthorized alteration and review the practice after material language, toolchain, architecture, threat, or vulnerability changes.
PW.5.1 covers language- and environment-appropriate secure coding practices; PW.7.1 and PW.8.1 make review, analysis, and testing organization-defined decisions; PW.7.2 and PW.8.2 call for recording and triaging issues and remediations; PO.3.3 addresses tool-generated artifacts.