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The 2006 Underhanded C Contest Begins

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the segmentation-fault-core-dumped dept.

Xcott Craver writes "The second annual Underhanded C Code Contest is live as of April 4th, and runs until July 4th. The object is to write malicious C code that looks perfectly readable and innocent under informal inspection of the source."

3 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Can someone explain this to me? by Valar · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Because it helps teach people to recognize malicious code?

    Think about it this way. You're the head dev on a big software project and are in charge of committing changes that the other programmers have made to the code base into the repository. You screen all the pieces of code to make sure they are reasonable before they get merged, right? Well, if you don't know anything about clever techniques that can be used to hide backdoors and other malicious code, one could sneak by you. Nobody finds the bad code until after the next release. Thousands of people have already downloaded and installed the code. Oops?

    --

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    Crudely Drawn Games
  2. Useless by marlinSpike · · Score: 0, Redundant

    This contest is useless... it's already been won and unlikely to be outdone -- dear member of slashdot, I give you... WINDOWS!

  3. Underhanded indeed ... by zc0705 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Underhanded ... doesn't sound that much different to Understaffed ... the resulting code probably has about the same number of defects ...