He is the co-author of a number of books on computer security, including The Myths of Security (O'Reilly, 2009), Beautiful Security, (O'Reilly, 2009) Building Secure Software (Addison Wesley, 2001), Network Security with OpenSSL (O’Reilly, 2002), the Secure Programming Cookbook (O’Reilly, 2003) and the 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security (McGraw Hill, 2005).

John Viega's contributions to field of software security also include OWASP's CLASP, a lightweight process for relating software development to security, a number of encryption implementations and early static analysis tools such as Rough Auditing Tool for Security and ITS4. He sits on the technical advisory board for Fortify Software.

In addition, Viega is the original author of the GNU Mailman mailing list program and was a major contributor to MUD server software frameworks.