The Most Clever 'Zip Bomb' Ever Made Explodes a 46MB File To 4.5 Petabytes

'Programmer and engineer David Fifield has unveiled a brand-new Zip
bomb that explodes a 46-megabyte file to 4.5 petabytes of data.
Fifield's new type of "Zip bomb" or "compression bomb" is particularly
novel because he "figured out how to 'overlap' files inside of a Zip
archive, allowing for compression rates far beyond those of a
traditional archive," reports Motherboard. From the report:

In an email interview, Fifield noted that, while 42.zip (which has a
106 billion-to-one compression ratio and has been hosted on the same
single-serving website for at least 15 years) gets much of the
attention, he finds later attempts more technically interesting. "eI
find 42.zip inspiring on an aesthetic level -- not so much the file
itself but the circumstances around it," Fifield said. "It's like
folklore. There must have been many examples of the same basic idea,
but for whatever reason 42.zip is the one that had staying power."

Fifield noted that part of what makes his process possible was by
coming up with ways to handle cyclic redundancy checks, or CRCs, a
basic error-correction functionality baked into Zip, PNG, Ethernet,
and numerous other technical standards. Messing around with CRC -- 32
checksums, as they're called, was where Fifield said he learned the
most. Fifield, who will present his findings at the USENIX Workshop on
Offensive Technologies (WOOT) conference next month, noted that while
the work itself adds to a history of research and likely will be
superseded in the future, its benefit from an awareness standpoint is
importan'

-- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/07/10/2341251

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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