Company
Date Published
Author
ZIP
Word count
2625
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

CrowdStrike's extensive blog post delves into the intricacies and vulnerabilities of the ZIP file format, highlighting the complexities involved in parsing and extracting data from ZIP archives. The text explains how ZIP's inherent redundancies and varying interpretations by different parsers can be exploited by adversaries, with specific focus on elements like file names, compression methods, and central directories. It further discusses how the format's flexibility, while useful, can pose security risks if not managed correctly. In response, CrowdStrike has developed a custom ZIP parser in Rust to reliably extract all potential data from ZIP files, aiming to address the format's vulnerabilities by not making assumption-based decisions, and instead attempting to gather the maximum possible information. The company hints at potentially open-sourcing this tool to aid the broader information security community.