Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to code a program that leaks information to the user but does so in a way that can’t be discovered in a code audit. This was the challenge for the 2014 Underhanded C contest; the seventh time they’ve held the event. [Richard Mitton] took part and wrote a very entertaining entry. He didn’t win, but he did just share the details of his super-sneaky code.

The challenge set out for the Citizen-Four-like coders set up a scenario where they were writing a program for a shady company (or sketchy government entity) which makes completely secret decisions based on publicly posted social media. The twist is they were tasked with getting code past an audit that leaked the decisions made by this program to the users being secretly observed.

Above is the core trick which [Richard] used after taking inspiration from Heartbleed. The struct assignment has an off-by-one error in it which is shown corrected in the lower code block. This, used in conjunction with malloc and free, allows memory to be used under the guise of storage during the encryption process. Secretly, this same bit of memory is accessed later and leaked to the user being targeted.

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