What Is The Devious Code Contest?

The Devious Code Contest is a contest with three parts, or challenges. For each challenge, you will put yourself in the shoes of an intern at an evil software company that you want to deliberately sabotage. To do this, you will write incorrect code for the company – code which looks superficially correct, but which really accomplishes a hidden goal. So as to not get in trouble with your bosses, you want to make your bug hard to find and, if found, appear to be a mistake made by an inexperienced programmer rather than a deliberate vulnerability.

How Does It Work?

We will release each of the three challenges three weeks apart, starting on Sunday, February 26. For each contest, you can submit your entry by emailing both your code and an explanation to submit@deviouscc.org within three weeks of the challenge’s release.

How Do I Win?

For each of the three challenges, we will have three judges judge the submissions subjectively according to how creative, clever, or humorous the submissions are. The three judge rankings will be combined to find a total winner. The winner of each of the three challenges will receive $25, up to a total of $75. In addition, our six favorite entries will be put up to all of the contestants for a “people’s choice” vote, which does not involve financial compensation.

How To Participate

To make sure we don’t get an excess amount of entries which will be impossible to judge in a timely manner, we ask you to register for the contest using this link [TODO: insert link]. For this first year, we will cap the number of contestants for each of the three challenges at 50 participants, so sign up fast to get a spot!

We wish you the best of luck and happy coding!

More information: This contest was inspired by the original Underhanded C Contest, which ran more or less annually up until 2015.