As a followup to http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/9393/, where we
pointed out vulnerabilities of some antivirus-gateways while
decompressing bzip2-bombs, we were interested in the behaviour of
various applications that process compressed data.
We've created several bombs (bzip2, gzip, zip, mime-embedded bombs, png
and gif graphics, openoffice zip bombs). With these we tested some more
applications like additional antivirus engines, various web browsers,
openoffice.org, and the Gimp.
As a result, much more applications as we thought crashed. The
manufacturers of software should care more about the processing of
untrusted input.
For details see our full advisory, written by Dr. Peter Bieringer:
http://www.aerasec.de/security/advisories/decompression-bomb-vulnerability.html