zip bomb

plural zip bombs · alternative zipbomb

1. computingA malicious zip file designed to produce a very large output, and consume a great deal of processing resources, during decompression.

   1 more example

   This article shows how to construct a non-recursive zip bomb whose compression ratio surpasses the DEFLATE limit of 1032. It works by overlapping files inside the zip container, in order to reference a "kernel" of highly compressed data in multiple files, without making multiple copies of it. The zip bomb's output size grows quadratically in the input size; i.e., the compression ratio gets better as the bomb gets bigger.

   2019 July 2, David Fifield, “A better zip bomb”, in bamsoftware.com, archived from the original on 18 Jan 2025

   Synonyms: zip of death