Saint Better Zip Bomb, Who Exploded Without Nesting

Patron of decompressors, curious antivirus engines, and small files with an enormous heart.

Life

In 2019 David Fifield built a better zip bomb. The old ones nested, one archive inside another; his instead overlapped the files so that a few kilobytes expanded into petabytes with no recursion at all. Opening it, or scanning it, was enough to blow up any tool. The variant against unzip took CVE-2019-13232.

Prayer

O Saint Better Zip Bomb, who hides an ocean in a drop, teach our decompressors to measure before they open. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by capping the size of extracted files and distrusting archives too generous for their few bytes.