{found in the margins}

It's a Bomb

This is a members-only episode of Found in the Margins, short bonus stories released on Patreon between full episodes.

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{show notes}

There is a file on the internet small enough to fit on an old floppy disk many times over. Open it and you’ll find sixteen more zip files. Open any one of those and you’ll find sixteen more.

In this episode

  • How 42 kilobytes can hold four and a half million gigabytes’ worth of zeros
  • The antivirus scanners that could spend days trying to decide whether one little attachment was safe
  • How David Fifield made a zip bomb that could expand to the same size after a single round of unpacking

Episode Music:

Additional Reading

Fifield, D. (2019). A better zip bomb. In 13th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT 19). USENIX Association. https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot19/presentation/fifield

Klaban, P. (2002, February 26). Re: Anti virus mailscanners DOS [Electronic mailing list message]. Bugtraq. https://seclists.org/bugtraq/2002/Feb/356

Marx, A. (2002, January). Trouble makers. Virus Bulletin, 14-15. https://www.virusbulletin.com/uploads/pdf/magazine/2002/200201.pdf#page=14

Weber, M. (2001, June 19). Re: Antivirus scanner DoS with zip archives [Electronic mailing list message]. Vulnerability Development. https://seclists.org/vuln-dev/2001/Jun/155