How does one make a Zip bomb?

Question

This question about zip bombs naturally led me to the Wikipedia page on the topic. The article mentions an example of a 45.1 kb zip file that decompresses to 1.3 exabytes.

Answer 1

A nice way to create a zipbomb (or gzbomb) is to know the binary format you are targeting. Otherwise, even if you use a streaming file (for example using /dev/zero) you'll still be limited by computing power needed to compress the stream.

A nice example of a gzip bomb: http://selenic.com/googolplex.gz57 (there's a message embedded in the file after several level of compression resulting in huge files)

Have fun finding that message :)