CyberChef - The Cyber Swiss Army Knife
CyberChef is a versatile, intuitive web application designed for analyzing and decoding data without the need for complex tools or programming knowledge. Developed by GCHQ, it offers a simple drag-and-drop interface to perform a wide range of operations, making it accessible to both technical and non-technical users. It runs entirely in the browser with no server-side component, ensuring data privacy (except for specific operations like 'Show on map' or 'DNS over HTTPS' which make external calls).
Key Features
- Hundreds of Operations: Supports tasks like Base64 decoding, timestamp conversion, data decompression, hashing (e.g., SHA3), and parsing certificates (e.g., X.509).
- Recipe System: Users can build complex analysis workflows by combining simple operations into 'recipes', which can be saved, shared, or reused.
- Magic Operation: Automatically detects encoded data and suggests relevant operations to decode or transform it.
- File Handling: Supports loading files up to 2GB, with drag-and-drop functionality and the ability to process multiple inputs via the 'Fork' operation.
- Privacy Focused: Operates client-side, ensuring data isn't uploaded unless specific external operations are used; network activity can be inspected via browser tools.
- Customizable Interface: Offers themes, word wrap, and other settings that persist across sessions using local storage.
- Offline Capability: Can be downloaded as a standalone ZIP for use in segregated or offline environments.
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity: Ideal for decoding malicious payloads, analyzing encrypted data, or reverse-engineering shellcode.
- Data Analysis: Useful for developers, analysts, and researchers to parse and transform data formats like JSON, hex, or compressed files.
- Education: Helps students and hobbyists learn about data encoding, encryption, and compression through hands-on experimentation.
- Prototyping: Allows quick testing of data processing ideas before scripting full solutions.
CyberChef targets a broad audience, including cybersecurity professionals, software developers, academics, and casual puzzle solvers. Its open-source nature on GitHub encourages community contributions, ensuring continuous improvement and new feature integration.
