Image Manipulation, Streams and Denial of Service
So, you have some type of application that does simple image manipulation – in most web applications case, resizing. You use some library, you construct an object with the image binary as a stream, and it does some wizardry magic and poof, you’ve just resized the image and stored it in a file in an image format of your choosing.
But wait – some image formats aren’t that trivial. Maybe we don’t care too much about the detail of how it does this, but we do care about what happens to our streams, how it’s used, and how much memory is consumed – after all, we wouldn’t want our application to crash or become unresponsive, right?