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A comment on Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find. Parent comment

Re:Trains were designed to break down after third-party repa... by bluGill on Thursday December 14, 2023 @09:24AM (#38641633)
They need to show audits and that the code is obscure enough that it could be missed. I've seen IOCCC type things that do things I wouldn't catch in a code review. (IIRC there is a malicious code contest where the goal is to put backdoors in that others don't see in review, but I can't recall what it is)
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Re:Trains were designed to break down after third-party repa... by 8372049 on Thursday December 14, 2023 @09:43AM (#38641841)
There's been a decent amount of those in the wild, too. If you're in an environment without unicode auditing you can do all sorts of crazy things without IOCCC levels of code tricks too.
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Re:Trains were designed to break down after third-party repa... by nneonneo on Thursday December 28, 2023 @02:03AM (#38790836)
You’re thinking of the Underhanded C contest: http://www.underhanded-c.org/. The goal is to write C code which looks completely innocent, but which actually performs some malicious or unwanted behaviour.

In the last year they ran the contest (2016), the goal was to write a program that would compare two sets of measurements for similarity (nominally radiation emission spectra) but fail to give a correct answer when given a particular crafted input.

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