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Underhanded C Contest announces winners

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the games-people-play dept.

Matthew Skala writes "The 2005 Underhanded C Contest has announced its winners: the team entry from M Joonas Pihlaja and Paul V-Khuong, and the solo entry from Natori Shin. The contest (which appeared on Slashdot in June) tests programmers' ability to hide malicious behaviour in innocent-seeming code, making it a kind of evil shadow twin to the International Obfuscated C Contest."

4 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'm still fond of this one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This one almost made it into the Linux kernel.

    It *did* make it into the kernel for anyone using the BK-to-CVS gateway.

  2. Runtime code generation by pkhuong · · Score: 4, Informative

    The CLR does JIT (or, at least, runtime) compilation. A common way to do so is to output the machine code on the stack. W^X usually breaks programs that do runtime code generation. Now, this is a WAG, but that's where my money's at.

    --
    Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
  3. Re:I'm still fond of this one by jnf · · Score: 5, Informative

    to anyone who makes a routine of putting their constants on the left hand side of the expression, that becomes not very hard to notice .. although intermixed with several megabytes of source it becomes less obvious. What I mean is: if (( (__WCLONE|__WALL) == options && 0 = current->uid)) will throw an error, whereas 0 == current->uid will not.

  4. Ken Thompson... by Sam+Nitzberg · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not exactly the same thing, but the most powerful and clever C code example with an 'underhanded' purpose must be Ken Thompson's classic...

    Reflections on Trusting Trust
    http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

    Other interesting papers that come to mind include Tom Duff's on Unix viruses, as well as McIlroy.

    Sam

    sam @ iamsam.com
    http: /www . iamsam . com