Decompression Bombs Part 2

The piece on decompression bombs was not supposed to be a panic piece, as it seems is implied, rather it was an informative one about a hidden danger in handling compressed files and, in my view, a neat little trick.To respond to some questions about it: someone asked how you would create the compressed file in the first place since compressing that much data would have to be done in memory, causing you the same problem. Very astute! The answer is that you don't: the uncompressed data never exists. You need to know enough about your compression algorithm to construct the compressed file directly, writing the output without any real input. This is not that tricky for most formats. The fact of the matter is that you can download decompression bombs quite freely.In response to a comment by David Russell, and to illustrate some points more clearly, I'm going to discuss some more concrete examples. First of all, David raises the issue that this just means "you restart". Naively, yes, it ...

20:29:38 January 12, 2006, Thursday (PST) Source: Solitude

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