Adam Caudill

Security Leader, Researcher, Developer, Writer, & Photographer

On the Underhanded Crypto Contest

On August 15th of last year I asked if anybody would be interested in a contest for the best, most evil underhanded crypto techniques — the response was clear, and less than a month later I announced the creation of the contest.

Before I go any further, the contest simply wouldn’t have been possible without the huge effort by Taylor Hornby to help organize, coordinate and communicate. I couldn’t have asked for a better co-organizer for this event.

Just over six months after the announcement, yesterday we finally announced the winners (only two months later than planned).

The winners, and really all of those that entered, put an amazing amount of effort into it. The entries were fantastic, and quite honestly a few people found them a bit scary – simple, subtle, effective. This is exactly what we wanted though.

The goal of the contest, and the driving reason that we required the submissions be under an open license, was to provide researchers, developers, and reviewers with better insight into how these flaws can be introduced — and hopefully how to detect them.

Based on the comments we’ve received on the winners, I think this will certainly show how subtle these attacks can be. It’s our hope that this turns into a valuable training resource for the community, and will lead to fewer backdoors — intentional or otherwise.

We are discussing plans for the next Underhanded Crypto Contest now, and we’ll be announcing something soon.

Adam Caudill

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