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2008 Underhanded C Contest Officially Open

Posted by Soulskill on from the sneaky-sneaky dept.

Xcott Craver writes "The 2008 Underhanded C Contest has just opened. Every year, contestants are asked to write a simple, innocent, readable C program that appears to perform an innocent task — but implements some non-obvious evil behavior. This year's challenge: redact blocks from an image, but do it so that the excised pixels can somehow be retrieved. We also have listed the winners of last year's contest, which was to write a simple encryption utility that mysteriously and undetectably fails between 1 percent and 0.1 percent of the time. The winning entry is truly impressive." We discussed the first of these contests in 2005.

2 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Encryption utility that fails... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Actually since people haven't written debian (and it's derivatives) off for use anywhere, they got off pretty lightly. Debian is dead to me now.

  2. Redundant? by Spasemunki · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Nearly every piece of C code that I've ever seen has contained some hidden malicious (or at least willfully stupid) behavior.