Guess who’s back? The Binary Golf Grand Prix is back for it’s fourth annual outing! Sadly, after getting nerdsniped last year by the one and only @netspooky, I ended up not submitting an entry for last year’s competition (you can see what I got up to instead here). This year, the theme was self replication. To avoid being sent active virii, the Binary Golf Association required that the entry created only a single copy of itself, and did not re-execute itself.

Introduction It’s that time of year again - the Binary Golf Grand Prix is back for a third year running! You can also check out my entries to the first and second times this amazing competition ran. The theme this year was to produce a binary that crashes a given program. Bonus points for hijacking execution, and submitting a patch to the project that fixes the vulnerability. Coinciding with the announcement of this year’s competition, @netspooky told me about a little-known accessory for the GameBoy/GameBoy Colour/GameBoy Advance called the Mobile Adapter GB, which let players connect their console to the internet via their mobile phone.

This year, @netspooky announced another round of the Binary Golf Grand Prix. If you missed it last year, the challenge was to create a palindromic binary - you can see the writeup of my entry, BootNoodle, here. This time around, the theme was polyglots, i.e. the challenge was to create a binary (as small as possible - hence the Golf part…) that was simulateously another filetype. The rules were laid out very clearly into 2 categories: first - the smallest file that satisfied all the rules wins; second - rack up points by overlapping more and more filetypes with the bytes of your host binary.