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."

Comments

Re:What are the legal ramifications of this?

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

Why?

[simulacrum25]

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.

Re:Why?

[Nf1nk]

To find subtley malicous code in an open source project, we first must know what it looks like. Having contests like these creates a sample base of dangerous code and clever tricks to read and learn from.
It is sort of like the computer version of a bomb squad.

Re:It's a bad idea

[Catamaran]

C gives you just enough rope to hang yourself.

Java gives you a polished floor on which you can slip and break your neck.

C++ gives you a thermo-nuclear device.

You're just not used to it.

[Tyler Durden]

Problems: difficult to compile

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.