Discussion summary
The Underhanded C Contest involved coding challenges related to FP uncertainties and encoding command servers. Participants discussed past contests, ethical considerations of sharing submissions, and notable entries like 'leaky redaction.' The contest was inspired by earlier obfuscation competitions and remains a point of interest for programmers.
What the discussion says
- Participants appreciated the challenge and nostalgia of the contest.
- There is debate about the ethics of sharing contest submissions online.
- Some highlighted specific entries like 'leaky redaction' as innovative.
“Where you can encode an entire Command and Control server within rounding errors!”
“If I put my submission up on github, is that considered unethical in the days of LLMs?”
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- Hacker News
- Interesting that the case they were using was the Nuclear Threat Initiative and FP uncertainties, I've audited some, ah, nuclear-physics-related code that had an issue due to FP uncertainties...
- (2015). RIP.
- > The contest was initially inspired by Daniel Horn’s Obfuscated V contest in the fall of 2004 (note: the original page is long gone, and this link goes to a snapshot from archive.org). The object of that contest was to write a simple program to count votes, that somehow miscounts the votes on election day. I was greatly impressed to see how even a short program to simply count characters in a text file can be made to fail, and fail only on one specific day, so that the bug isn't noticed in testing.by BiraIgnacio