I'd say so. This is kind of a security question - the data is valid from the protocol's perspective, it's the contents that are malicious. It's up to the developer to decide how to handle that - if it's super important to be able to process such big numbers, modify the parser to handle that (for example by storing them on the HDD). Same goes for another serialization format: bencoding. It supports arbitrarily nested data structures and most implementations are recursive, which can easily result in stack overflow if you mess up the implementation. But I wouldn't blame the standard - that's the price you pay for flexibility. At the end of the day, you need to sanitize your input anyway and keep your edge cases in mind. Same goes with XML bombs...