Underhanded C Contest
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The Underhanded C Contest is a programming contest to turn out code that is malicious, but passes a rigorous inspection, and looks like an honest mistake. The contest rules define a task, and a malicious component. Entries must perform the task in a malicious manner as defined by the contest, and hide the malice. Contestants are allowed to use C-like compiled languages to make their programs.
The 2005 contest had the task of image processing, while embedding a watermark. Winning entries from 2005 used uninitialized data structures, reuse of pointers, and an embedding of shellcode in constants.
The current 2006 contest required entries to count word occurrences, and have vastly different runtimes on different operating systems. This year some entries used fork implementation errors, optimization problems, and various API implementation differences.
