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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. I'm still fond of this one by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This one almost made it into the Linux kernel. It looks like error checking until you read it carefully.Short, brilliant and to the point.

    if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0))
    retval = -EINVAL;

    In other words, you become root if you call sys_wait4()with the __WCLONE|__WALL) flags

    Story here and here

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  2. Re:Bill Gates Entry by makomk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Very true. For those of you who don't get it, one of the winners uses a technique very similar to the way Word (all versions AFAIK) leaks data into documents - an uninitialised buffer.

  3. Re:Bill Gates Entry by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Found an interesting thing at work recently, during trials of VB.net and the .Net framework. Our VB.net programmers applications worked right up until one day, when suddenly, they stopped working. Simple things like messages in Message Boxes stopped appearing, or labels on buttons went astray, mouse cursor changes on mouseover events showing black boxes instead of the image. Very wierd we thought. He reinstalled the .Net framework, VS.Net, everything he could think of but nothing rectified the problems. We eventually found out what the problem was - McAffee Virus protection now includes buffer overrun protection. Turn that off, and everything worked fine. Wierd, just wierd.

  4. Corewar veterans by lastfish · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Joonas & Paul are both Corewar veterans being respectively co-authors of Son of Vain (Joonas P & Ian Oversby) top of the all-time hall-of-fame and nPaper II (Paul V-K & John Metcalf) dominant paper of its time.

    Good practice for writing obscure, but useful, code.

    I'd give clickable links but fear for these sites under load.

    www.corewar.info/
    www.corewar.co.uk/94nophof.txt