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

It's a bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Count on the likes of Sun, Microsoft, and anyone else selling a non-C language to pounce on this as a marketing opportunity.

C is a superb language. Why besmirch its reputation with a contest to make it seem as untrustworthy as possible?

Attack the Compiler

[LionKimbro]

Why attack the source code when you can instead attack the compiler?

You need only attack the compiler, or the linker, or the interpreter.

An example from years ago

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

There was a bug in the Watcom compiler for DOS many years ago. As a bug report I sent them a piece of code something like:

char *s = "Fortune coookie";
int *p = (char *)s;
for (i = 0; i<4; ++i) {
putchar(((char *)p)[i]);
}

Looks innocent enough. But actually it actually printed an obscenity. There was a bug in the pointer addition code generated by the compiler so that even though (char *)p was a pointer to type char it still used sizeof(int) to index into the array and so it printed every 4th character. (And that explains why I used three o's.)