How does one make a Zip bomb?

Create a 1.3 exabyte file of zeros.

Right click > Send to compressed (zipped) folder.

Citing from the Wikipedia page:

One example of a Zip bomb is the file 45.1.zip which was 45.1 kilobytes of compressed data, containing nine layers of nested zip files in sets of 10, each bottom layer archive containing a 1.30 gigabyte file for a total of 1.30 exabytes of uncompressed data.

So all you need is one single 1.3GB file full of zeroes, compress that into a ZIP file, make 10 copies, pack those into a ZIP file, and repeat this process 9 times.

This way, you get a file which, when uncompressed completely, produces an absurd amount of data without requiring you to start out with that amount.

Additionally, the nested archives make it much harder for programs like virus scanners (the main target of these "bombs") to be smart and refuse to unpack archives that are "too large", because until the last level the total amount of data is not that much, you don't "see" how large the files at the lowest level are until you have reached that level, and each individual file is not "too large" - only the huge number is problematic.

Below is for Windows:

From the Security Focus proof of concept (NSFW!), it's a ZIP file with 16 folders, each with 16 folders, which goes on like so (42 is the zip file name):

\42\lib 0\book 0\chapter 0\doc 0\0.dll
...
\42\lib F\book F\chapter F\doc F\0.dll

I'm probably wrong with this figure, but it produces 4^16 (4,294,967,296) directories. Because each directory needs allocation space of N bytes, it ends up being huge. The dll file at the end is 0 bytes.

Unzipped the first directory alone \42\lib 0\book 0\chapter 0\doc 0\0.dll results in 4gb of allocation space.

This is easily done under Linux using the following command:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=10000 | zip zipbomb.zip -

Replace count with the number of KB you want to compress. The example above creates a 10MiB zip bomb (not much of a bomb at all, but it shows the process).

You DO NOT need hard disk space to store all the uncompressed data.