The SEI CERT Coding Standards are software coding standards developed by the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. They are steadily becoming one of the key industry references for creating safe and secure software. One of these is SEI CERT C which has been updated for C11 but is also applicable to the earlier versions of the C language.

CERT C is primarily intended for software developers. However, it is also used by software integrators to define the requirements concerning code quality. There is a special interest for high-stakes and critical code developers who must build reliable code that is robust and resistant to attacks. That is why these standards are increasingly being used as a metric to evaluate the quality of the source code.