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The First Annual Underhanded C Contest
Xcott Craver writes "We have just announced a new annual contest, the Underhanded C Contest, to write clear, readable, innocent-looking C code that implements malicious behavior. The object is to hide evil functionality that survives visual inspection of the source. The prize is beer."
You mean like Hitler's infamous Beer Hall Putsch?
The authorities start a contest such as this, an unsuspecting programmer submits a malicious program, and he or she is arrested and charged with a variety of computer crimes.
What computer crimes would be broken?
Frankly, I won't participate in this contest considering the current legal state of America.
No, you won't participate because of yor current state of paranoia over the legal state of America.
And like I said, do it in Java instead. That'll make it a real challenge, since the designers of Java made an effort to make it difficult to write malicious code in the first place. The point isn't that the code will look valid, but rather that it will perform malicious duties, which is something that is a challenge in Java, but easily done in C. Making it look valid is just an additional challenge for both languages.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Everyone knows that it is possible to write malicious code in C. That's just because C gives you the near utmost control over your system, and does not discrminiate based on human emotions like "good", "bad", and "malicious". Perhaps a better idea would have been to try to write malicious code in a language such as Java, which tries to prevent a programmer from writing such code. That would be a real challenge.
Yeah, I just flip the "+good +bad -malicious" flags on javac when I want to trust code. Come on, that's ridiculous.
This is not a hard task, but it's kind of stupid, on the order of "who can break into the most computers today" (I dunno, who can run nmap the longest?)
There are so many *interesting* things that could be done as a programming contest, and the submitter chose something that's a pain in the ass for other people, doesn't really challenge the brain ("shortest version of X"), and can't be used for much other than bogus arguments that "C is dangerous" or the obvious card, "Open Source is insecure" (you can look at the much larger sample set of SourceForge and the lack of Trojans implanted and later discovered).
The number of *interesting* security stories that could have challenged people and been useful is legion. "Can we have a system that is unbreakable and does X", (followed by the inevitable followup posts where people punch holes in the design) or other things. You could have asked "How can OSS projects avoid allowing malicious code being sumitted?", which would have started an interesting set of threads from people who work on proof-carrying code, would have taught readers something, and maybe provided improved security for the world at large. Instead, we're going to see a handful of bad, obfuscated C, and a bunch of halfassed arguments against C and OSS, neither of which has much connection with reality. There will be some language arguments, where someone says "we should use [LANGUAGE_WITH_BOUNDSCHECKING]", some security guy that will point out that this doesn't begin to avoid stopping malicious code, someone will make some stupid arguments about how their favorite OS is more secure than anyone else's, we'll get some rehash of NX features that have been done time and time again on Slashdot...seriously, goddammit. The day someone makes a knockoff of Slashdot that's a bit more computer-science oriented and isn't solely aimed at producing the same tired old trolling every day is the day I jump ship.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I nominate Diebold!
Now if only we can get them to enter their code in the contest...
Hacking was never about malicious behaviour, it was about learning and understanding. Granted, much of what one learned could be applied in malicious ways, but that wasn't the goal. Coding contests whether they be geared towards obfuscation or speed are still learning endeavors.
Who is behind this and what is their motivations? What will they do with the ideas submitted in this contest? In a day of professional computer hackers, this is not a contest to have.
Java gives you a polished floor on which you can slip and break your neck.
C++ gives you a thermo-nuclear device.
Test 1 2 3 4
My original post was to be along the lines of 'how long before this kind of technique is used to poison Open Source?'...
:)
Tin foil hat on, for sure.
That'll make it a real challenge, since the designers of Java made an effort to make it difficult to write malicious code in the first place.
Actually, that's not really the case... not for the kind of "malicious code" that they're talking about here. They're not talking about "getting out of the sandbox", they're talking about "hiding information in the output". It's actually a lot easier to hide this kind of "malicious code" in an object-oriented language because you can play games with the namespace.
No, not seriously. I was just reading an article on the Patriot Act, though, and was thinking about how the masses--the same ones who are willing to accept that using BitTorrent is equivalent to terrorism--might see this sort of endeavor.
The CB App. What's your 20?
On a more serious note - they should rethink their prize. Not everyone drinks beer, and there are plenty of talented programmers who avoid it completely. In fact, the ones who do probably have more working brain cells to throw at the problem.
:p)
Yes, I know that must come as a shock, and most people here probably won't believe me...yet it's true.
(And just to head off the inevitable nutcase looking for a Score:5, Funny: no, replacing the prize with free pr0n isn't going to cut it.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Anyone who has to make use of Godwins law obviously must agree with Hitler. Godwins law is equal to censorship. Just because you dont discuss Hitler, the nazis, fascism, etc does not mean it suddenly ceased to exist.
The new law which evolves beyond godwins law to allow people to discuss hitler shall be called what? Slashhdot can think of a name right?
A picky compiler is a blessing, not a curse. It's much easier to identify and fix compile errors than run-time errors.
difficult to convert to better languages (thank you preprocessor)
Meaningless troll.
encourages obfuscation
Unless the compiler is literally holding a gun to your head, this is meaningless. In C you have nearly limitless control to write your code the way you feel is clearest. If it came out obfuscated then you have nobody to blame but yourself.
some constructs are clearly tacked on and/or poorly implemented (switch), arbitrary nonorthogonality (struct, parens and brace usage, pointer/array declaration), shitty strings.
Tacked on? If you don't like the way constructs are set up then fine, that's your opinion. But if you read The C Programming Language you can tell that every single construct was scrutinized over for the proper balance of efficiency (why it makes sense to pass array parameters as pointers and structs as copies) and consistency (why data types are declared the way they are. Declaration and use of data is made to match.) Do you honestly believe the creators/first users of C, some of the greatest programmers who ever lived, really said, "Ahhh, fuck it. Let's just throw something together," when designing their own programming tools?
Most people who don't like C are really just saying they don't like low-level programming because that's what it was designed for, and that's what it's perfect for. Too many newbie programmers get used to some modern, flash-in-the-pan, all-things-to-all-people languages and when they are faced with the challenges of low-level languages rashly conclude that it's the language's fault they're having problems.
C is the perfect language for the job it was designed for. The same cannot be said for most more modern languages.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Well...
C is good for what it was first used for: writing Unix. At least initially, it was mimimalistic; orthogonality took a back seat to ease of implementation. (See Gabriel's classic essay for details.)
(It's certainly not flawless. Any language that needs a utility like cdecl to make declarations understandable has problems, and there should've been a Boolean type from the beginning. It would be nice if char (which should be whatever represents a glyph on the target system) weren't conflated with short short int. Basically, if C were in your back yard, it would be declared an "attractive nuisance.")
I think the authors of The Art of Unix Programming wisely recognize that C, like any other tool, should be used only where appropriate. (Sorry if that's tautological, but I can't think of a better way to put it.)
Writing code of that quality that looks like it does what it's supposed to do, while actually doing something subtly different, sounds like a very difficult challenge to me.
Programmers do that every day. It's called a "bug". Now, doing something subtly different and controlling what the subtly different thing actually is, that is a challenge.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, quite right.
I guess the thing is: What we're really concerned about here, (if I may project a little,) is voting software.
In those cases, they're probably not going to say, "download the compiler from a random site on the net." In fact, it's probably going to be very hard to control the people who compile the software, and even harder to control the people who compile the compiler. At some point, somebody's going to get the compiler, and they're going to get it from some specified place.
If it's a secret place, then the vote is determined by whoever controls that secret place. If it's a public place, well- that's something to think about.
Maybe we should have a Federal list of 100 places to get the compiler from. Or a thousand places. However it is done, we want to make it more expensive to buy the vote than the vote is worth.