Zip Bomb

Turkish equivalent: Zip bombasıDomain: Cybersecurity

An archive attack that turns a small compressed input into excessive CPU, memory, disk, or recursive extraction work.

A zip-bomb defense cannot rely only on the compressed file size. Nested archives are the classic form, but overlapping-entry techniques can achieve extreme expansion ratios without recursive layers.

Safe Extraction Policy

Upload and scanning pipelines should define resource limits before extraction:

  • total expanded bytes
  • per-entry size
  • entry count
  • nesting depth
  • CPU/time budget
  • compression ratio
  • symbolic-link and path-traversal policy

Leaving the limit to free disk space alone can still let one worker consume CPU and memory badly enough to damage tail latency for unrelated jobs.

Source

  • https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/