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Amit Singh's Challenge: Find a Decade-Old Bug
dreicodan writes "Well this has too many juicy Mac OS X nuggets in one bag! All details are on this page, but I'll summarise. Apparently Amit Singh discovered a 10+ year old serious bug in OS X. The bug started in Nextstep and is still in Panther (and apparently Tiger, too). Then Amit wrote a program to demo the bug, but also made the program capable of hiding what it does using some complicated Mach kernel voodo! He then threw a challenge open to OS X experts to figure out the bug. It turns out that a week and some 1000 downloads later, three brilliant hackers (Alexy Proskuryakov, Andrew Wellington, Graham Dennis) were able to solve the puzzle. Also looks like other than these guys, nobody got anywhere with the problem. Be ready for extremely gory details of how the program was written and how it was decoded. Its a thrilling read, and OS X hacking doesn't get any more hardcore than this! Hopefully Apple fixes this bug now at last."
I think one of the reasons why only a few people submitted their analysis was because of how the contest was structured.
Singh said he was going to give the prize to the first person with a correct submission. Not the best submission, nor the most complete submission, or the most creative submission.
So I think people just gave up after the first couple of submissions were posted. He shouldn't have displayed the number of submissions that had been received.
Also, this challenge didn't hit Slashdot until after it was finished. I know I didnt' hear about it until after the first two submissions were submitted.
It was fun to track down though.
I agree. Either they didn't know it was there, or they didn't think it was important enough to fix right away.
But that's different from them not knowing how to fix something, which I'm sure they do.
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
I don't see anything in TFA to indicate that Apple knew about this bug before now- he just mentions that the bug has been present with no explanation as to how this was determined. Singh even spends a good bit of text explaining how the bug is triggered by ultra-low-level routines that are not normally used by anything above the BSD layer, so I'd say there's a good chance it has never even been encountered by anyone before, if OS X's own process creation code is sufficiently solid as to never generate the inconsistency panpipes does.