Episode 132: Archive Testing Methodology with Mathias Karlsson

Episode 132: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast, Justin Gardner is joined by Mathias Karlsson to discuss vulnerabilities associated with archives. They talk about his new tool, Archive Alchemist, and explore topics like the significance of Unicode paths, symlinks, and TAR before they end up talking about Charsets again..
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Today's Sponsor: ThreatLocker - Patch Management (criticalthinkingpodcast.io/TL-patch-management)
Today’s Guest: Mathias Karlsson (x.com/avlidienbrunn)
====== This Week in Bug Bounty ======
Swiss Post's 2025 Public Intrusion Test starts on July 28 (yeswehack.com/programs/swiss-post-evoting)
Intigriti teams with NVIDIA (intigriti.com/blog/business-insights/intigriti…)
Bugcrowd Ingenuity Awards (live-bug-crowd.pantheonsite.io/blog/announcing…)
Hack the Hacker Series - AI Vulnerabilities and Bug Bounties (youtube.com/watch?v=syXVGe8zPSY)
A Novel Technique for SQL Injection in PDO’s Prepared Statements (slcyber.io/assetnote-security-research-center/…)
How We Accidentally Discovered a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in ETQ Reliance (slcyber.io/assetnote-security-research-center/…)
====== Resources ======
Archive Alchemist (github.com/avlidienbrunn/archivealchemist)
Hacking Livestream #53: The ZIP file format (youtube.com/watch?v=X7j2sisMKzk)
====== Timestamps ======
(00:00:00) Introduction
(00:10:04) Archive Alchemist
(00:36:05) Unicode Extensions, normalization, and confusion attacks on Zip parsers
(00:48:44) Character Sets
(01:01:49) 7zip & File Names
(01:06:44) Path Traversal, Symlinks & Identifying Techniques
(01:36:05) Hardlinks and TAR