4 ms·
Reminds me of how you could crash a fido node by sending them some big empty files, so when they got automatically unzipped the filled of the harddrive :)
by andersthue 11y ago
Reminds me of how you could crash a fido node by sending them some big empty files, so when they got automatically unzipped the filled of the harddrive :)
- fizgig 11y agoI think this kind of thing was common even a few years ago in DoS'ing mail gateways that uncompressed and scanned various archive formats. Things like really huge files when uncompressed or ridiculously deep nested directory structures. I think most software these days is immune to such tricks, or at least has tunables to reduce the chance of such tricks causing harm.
- dingaling 11y agoThere was also the trick of infinitely recursive zips that kept decompressing to a copy of themselves. Zip-bombing was such a problem for our corporate network in the late 1990s that inbound e-mail attachments were deliberately discarded for a while. Chaos ensured.
- digi_owl 11y agoZip bombs, a relative of the fork bomb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb The billion laughs XML attack is also lovely in its simplicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs
- Koahku 11y agoI was doing a presentation about various bombs last year and crashed PowerPoint by copy-pasting billion laughs in a slide. Simple but extremely effective.
- digi_owl 11y agoNot sure what is worse: that MS has Powerpoint interpreting randomly pasted XML, or that they do not have handling for excessive memory usage beyond crashing the whole program.