cyberchef

CyberChef is going to be your best friend ...

CyberChef is a browser-based data analysis and transformational tool, the "Cyber Swiss Army Knife."
It provides a large collection of operations for encoding, decoding, encryption, hashing, compression, data extraction, and forensic analysis
It is sometimes described as

Common Uses

CyberChef is particularly useful for:

• Encoding / Decoding

  • Number bases
    • Base64
    • Binary
    • Hexadecimal
  • URL encoding
  • Unicode

• Cryptography

  • XOR
  • AES
  • DES
  • RC4
  • RSA operations
  • ROT / Caesar ciphers

• Hashing

  • MD5, SHA-256, HMAC, etc

• Compressed data,

  • can identify data as being gzip, zip, 7zip, etc.

• Data Conversion

  • Hex ↔ text
  • Binary ↔ text
  • Decimal ↔ hex
  • Character-code conversion
  • Timestamps and date formats

Recipes

CyberChef operations are arranged into a recipe.

A recipe is a sequence of operations applied to the input from top to bottom.

You could create a recipe containing

1. From Base64
2. Gunzip
3. Decode text

The output of each operation becomes the input to the next.

This makes CyberChef especially useful when data has multiple layers of encoding, encryption, or compression.

The Magic Operation

( notice the magic wand above the output section)

• attempts to automatically identify transformations that may make unknown data readable.

Example: Malware Analysis

Suppose malware contains a string that is:

Base64 encoded → XOR encrypted → gzip compressed

A CyberChef recipe could reverse those operations:

1. From Base64
2. XOR
3. Gunzip
4. Examine the resulting text or binary data

This allows an analyst to rapidly test transformations without writing a custom Python script for every step.

CyberChef lets you experiment with data interactively.