TL;DR

A fun challenge/puzzle: quine.zip.

I recently discovered what a Zip bomb is:

In computing, a zip bomb, also known as a decompression bomb or zip of death, is a malicious archive file designed to crash or render useless the program or system reading it.

In brief, it’s a specially crafted ZIP archive that can easily fill up your disk and hog your resources if opened too eagerly (which is what you usually want from your antivirus).

In an effort to provide an hands-on approach for one brilliant technique that can go on forever, it’s easy to land on quine.zip, which provides an interesting puzzle whose solution is at the core of how this tricky ZIP file works. To keep the koanish spirit of the website, I particularly liked the following remark:

Yes, such a quine is possible, and no, I won’t tell you what it is.

Well said!

I found a solution in 8 commands/lines; looking around, I could not find shorter solutions, which is a good ego booster until I’ll be told differently 😎

Just for future me, I put it here (others, please don’t look at it!). To some extent I feel like it’s a bit of cheating, because the solution found elsewhere to produce the real Quine-compliant ZIP file could not adopt the same approach. Still, it works on that website and it’s all I needed.

Stay safe and challenged!