CyberChef
The Cyber Swiss Army Knife
CyberChef is a simple, intuitive web app for carrying out all manner of "cyber" operations within a web browser. These operations include simple encoding like XOR and Base64, more complex encryption like AES, DES and Blowfish, creating binary and hexdumps, compression and decompression of data, calculating hashes and checksums, IPv6 and X.509 parsing, changing character encodings, and much more.
The tool is designed to enable both technical and non-technical analysts to manipulate data in complex ways without having to deal with complex tools or algorithms. It was conceived, designed, built and incrementally improved by an analyst in their 10% innovation time over several years.
Contents
Official website
CyberChef's official website can be found here - have fun!
Running Locally
You can run CyberChef with Docker (no toolchain required) or build it from source with Node.js.
With Docker
Prerequisites
- Docker
- Docker Desktop must be open and running on your machine
Option 1: Build the Docker Image Yourself
- Build the docker image
docker build --tag cyberchef --ulimit nofile=10000 .
- Run the docker container
docker run -it -p 8080:8080 cyberchef
- Navigate to
http://localhost:8080 in your browser
Option 2: Use the pre-built Docker Image
If you prefer to skip the build process, you can use the pre-built image
docker run -it -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/gchq/cyberchef:latest
Just like before, navigate to http://localhost:8080 in your browser.
This image is built and published through our GitHub Workflows.
From source
If you want to develop CyberChef or run it without Docker, you can build it directly with Node.js.
Prerequisites
[!NOTE]
You can use nvm to manage Node.js versions and use the current development version in this project to avoid conflicts with other projects on your machine.
Setup
git clone https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef.git
cd CyberChef
npm install
Common tasks
| Command |
Description |
npm start |
Run the development server with live reload at http://localhost:8080. |
npm run build |
Produce a production build in the build/prod directory. |
npm test |
Run the Node.js and operation test suites. |
npm run testui |
Run the browser (UI) tests. |
npm run lint |
Check the code against the linting rules. |
npm run newop |
Scaffold a new operation via the interactive quickstart script. |
If you hit an out-of-memory error while building large recipes, increase Node's heap size with npm run setheapsize.
How it works
There are four main areas in CyberChef:
- The input box in the top right, where you can paste, type or drag the text or file you want to operate on.
- The output box in the bottom right, where the outcome of your processing will be displayed.
- The operations list on the far left, where you can find all the operations that CyberChef is capable of in categorised lists, or by searching.
- The recipe area in the middle, where you can drag the operations that you want to use and specify arguments and options.
You can use as many operations as you like in simple or complex ways. Some examples are as follows:
Features
- Drag and drop
- Operations can be dragged in and out of the recipe list, or reorganised.
- Files up to 2GB can be dragged over the input box to load them directly into the browser.
- Auto Bake
- Whenever you modify the input or the recipe, CyberChef will automatically "bake" for you and produce the output immediately.
- This can be turned off and operated manually if it is affecting performance (if the input is very large, for instance).
- Automated encoding detection
- CyberChef uses a number of techniques to attempt to automatically detect which encodings your data is under. If it finds a suitable operation that make sense of your data, it displays the 'magic' icon in the Output field which you can click to decode your data.
- Breakpoints
- You can set breakpoints on any operation in your recipe to pause execution before running it.
- You can also step through the recipe one operation at a time to see what the data looks like at each stage.
- Save and load recipes
- If you come up with an awesome recipe that you know you’ll want to use again, just click "Save recipe" and add it to your local storage. It'll be waiting for you next time you visit CyberChef.
- You can also copy the URL, which includes your recipe and input, to easily share it with others.
- Search
- If you know the name of the operation you want or a word associated with it, start typing it into the search field and any matching operations will immediately be shown.
- Highlighting
- Save to file and load from file
- You can save the output to a file at any time or load a file by dragging and dropping it into the input field. Files up to around 2GB are supported (depending on your browser), however, some operations may take a very long time to run over this much data.
- CyberChef is entirely client-side
- It should be noted that none of your recipe configuration or input (either text or files) is ever sent to the CyberChef web server - all processing is carried out within your browser, on your own computer.
- Due to this feature, CyberChef can be downloaded and run locally. You can use the link in the top left corner of the app to download a full copy of CyberChef and drop it into a virtual machine, share it with other people, or host it in a closed network.
Deep linking
By manipulating CyberChef's URL hash, you can change the initial settings with which the page opens.
The format is https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=Operation()&input=...
Supported arguments are recipe, input (encoded in Base64), and theme.
Browser support
CyberChef is built to support
- Google Chrome 50+
- Mozilla Firefox 38+
Node.js support
CyberChef is built to fully support Node.js v24 and is also tested against Node.js v26 ahead of it becoming the active LTS release. For more information, see the "Node API" wiki page
Security
Please see the CyberChef security policy.
Contributing
Contributing a new operation to CyberChef is super easy! The quickstart script will walk you through the process. If you can write basic JavaScript, you can write a CyberChef operation.
An installation walkthrough, how-to guides for adding new operations and themes, descriptions of the repository structure, available data types and coding conventions can all be found in the "Contributing" wiki page.
- Push your changes to your fork.
- Submit a pull request. If you are doing this for the first time, you will be prompted to sign the GCHQ Contributor Licence Agreement via the CLA assistant on the pull request. This will also ask whether you are happy for GCHQ to contact you about a token of thanks for your contribution, or about job opportunities at GCHQ.
Licencing
CyberChef is released under the Apache 2.0 Licence and is covered by Crown Copyright.
CyberChef 是一个网页应用，把编码、加密、压缩、哈希以及其他数据分析操作（即“cyber”操作）整合到一个拖放式配方构建器中，全部在你的浏览器里运行。