The Underhanded C Contest

AmazingEveryDay

(2015). RIP.

BiraIgnacio

> 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. https://underhanded-c.org/_page_id_7.html

pseudohadamard

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...