What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.8.28 Secure coding?

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.28, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats; Secure coding standards and a minimum baseline applying to in-house and outsourced development, updated from current threat and vulnerability information; IDE and pipeline configuration enforcing secure coding checks, including SAST results and remediation records; Threat models and peer review records for significant changes; Pre-release records of attack surface review and mitigation of common programming errors.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.8.28?

Hard-coded credentials and secrets appear in source code

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · Technological controls

`A.8.28` Secure coding

Software development is to follow secure coding principles. Purpose (stated in ISO/IEC 27002:2022): ensures software is written securely, reducing potential vulnerabilities. As an Annex A reference control, it is compared with the controls determined in risk treatment (6.1.3 c) and recorded in the Statement of Applicability as included or excluded, with the justification and implementation status (6.1.3 d); implementation guidance is ISO/IEC 27002:2022 8.28.

Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, A.8.28. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open ISO/IEC 27001:2022 in the compliance library.

Clauses 4 to 10 are the management-system requirements: none of them can be excluded when an organisation claims conformity. The 93 Annex A controls are a reference set: one may be excluded with a justification in the Statement of Applicability. Certification bodies assess conformity; the evidence lists here are what auditors commonly ask for, not a list the standard prescribes.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Policy repository / GRC workspace

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

IDE and pipeline configuration enforcing secure coding checks, including SAST results and remediation records · Source control / CI pipeline

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Threat models and peer review records for significant changes · Document repository
Pre-release records of attack surface review and mitigation of common programming errors · Source control / CI pipeline

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Statement of Applicability entry for control A.8.28, showing inclusion or justified exclusion, implementation status and the risks it treats · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Secure coding standards and a minimum baseline applying to in-house and outsourced development, updated from current threat and vulnerability information · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Mostly documents and reviews. Pull the 1 system-held artefact from your Source control / CI pipeline on a schedule; put the documents under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a dated record with a named reviewer.

Common gaps auditors find

Hard-coded credentials and secrets appear in source code
Open source libraries are pulled in without inventory or update tracking
SAST findings are ignored or suppressed without review
Vendor packages are modified locally with no assessment of future maintenance impact

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

A.8.27 Secure system architecture and engineering principles · A.8.29 Security testing in development and acceptance