The 7th Underhanded C Contest Is Online
Xcott Craver writes The 7th Underhanded C Contest is now open. The goal of the contest is to write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet somehow exhibits evil behavior that cannot be seen even when staring at the source code. The winners from 2013 are also online, and their clever and insightful submissions make for fun reading.
If you read the whole thing you'd notice that you're playing the role of an NSA insider who's leaking information... I thought you people liked that sort of thing?
Don't get me wrong this is all great fun yet many of these schemes stand no chance of being committed in any serious project.
Implicit returns generate compiler warnings.
printf variable as format specifier is a well known security issue lazy eyeballs and static analysis tools check for.
Serialization delimiter games are also well known issues standing little chance of being accepted.