The University of Washington chapter of the Society of Women Engineers is putting on their quarterly career fair today at the Husky Union Building, and I’ll be there with a couple of my fabulous Coverity colleagues. If you happen to be a UW student reading this and want to stop on by for a round of my favourite game, “Spot the Defect” please do. We’ll be presenting a whole pile of buggy code; some of the defects will be quite straightforward and some of them will be subtle, but they all have a lesson.

If you want to play along at home, here’s one of the easy ones; this code was in a real used-by-customers product when Coverity’s static analysis engine discovered it:

{
  ...
  if (!strcmp(argv[i], "-configure"))
  {
    if (getuid() != 0 && geteuid != 0)
    {
      puts("Only root can use -configure.n");
      exit(1);
    }
  }
  xf86DoConfigure = TRUE;
  xf86AllowMouseOpenFail = TRUE;
  return 1;
}

Can you spot the defect and describe its consequence?

Anyways, like I said, if you’re a UW student then stop on by the booth and we’ll chat. The fair is open 12:30 to 5:30; if you’re a SWE member then you get early admission and can come in any time after 12:00. Hope to see you there!

Next time on FAIC: The solution to today’s puzzle.