[HN Gopher] CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
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       CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
        
       Author : _xerces_
       Score  : 117 points
       Date   : 2024-02-01 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (gchq.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (gchq.github.io)
        
       | saagarjha wrote:
       | CyberChef is really useful, and it runs locally, so you never
       | have to send your sensitive data to some random server anymore.
       | The "recipes" feature is quite powerful, too, but I think my
       | favorite thing about it is that I can often just paste random
       | data in and run the "Magic" script and it'll try to guess the
       | data format for me.
        
         | nailer wrote:
         | > you never have to send your sensitive data to some random
         | server anymore
         | 
         | If you live in the UK you are already sending one entire month
         | of your full personal communications, and three months of your
         | communications metadata, to this government organisation.
         | Pardon the off-topic rant.
        
           | meowface wrote:
           | Do we have decent reason to believe this is no longer the
           | case for US citizens and the NSA, post-Snowden?
        
       | LelouBil wrote:
       | I never realized it was a UK governemnt agency developing this !
        
         | seanhunter wrote:
         | Yes. GCHQ is the signals intelligence agency that grew out of
         | the work at Bletchley Park on code breaking in WW2. So the UK's
         | version of the NSA.
         | 
         | https://www.gchq.gov.uk/ <- this is their website.[1]
         | 
         | [1] If you click on it they will be able to track you down via
         | your IP address and super seekret cyberspy-fu. Just kidding.
         | .... or am I? Actually I really am. I have no way of knowing
         | either way. Or do I? I mean, how would you know? I really don't
         | though. At least as far as you know.
        
           | mindcrime wrote:
           | _If you click on it they will be able to track you down via
           | your IP address and super seekret cyberspy-fu. Just kidding.
           | .... or am I? Actually I really am. I have no way of knowing
           | either way. Or do I? I mean, how would you know? I really don
           | 't though. At least as far as you know._
           | 
           | Only if they know Visual Basic.
        
             | function_seven wrote:
             | Well, this _is_ a GUI, so it stands to reason that they 're
             | experts in Visual Basic.
        
           | airblade wrote:
           | Actually the NSA is the US's version of GCHQ.
        
           | JetSetIlly wrote:
           | GCHQ was the cover name for Bletchley Park but the
           | organisation's name at the time was GC&CS which was
           | established in 1919. So very old and surprisingly predates
           | WW2
        
         | RobinL wrote:
         | Yes. This is actually (as far as I know) by far the most
         | popular UK gov repo on GitHub in terms of number of stars -
         | kudos to the devs!
        
         | Havoc wrote:
         | I had always assumed it's just a username too
        
       | _xerces_ wrote:
       | I love how you can build complex operations from each of the
       | simple primitives like From Hex->Uppercase->XOR->Remove NULL->To
       | Hex and save them as a recipe. It reminds me of the Linux command
       | line where each program is simple but you can pipe the output of
       | one into another to create a chain that can perform complex data
       | processing.
        
       | mindcrime wrote:
       | How did I not know about this until just now? VERY cool. I'll
       | definitely be using this going forward!
        
         | spydum wrote:
         | Literally one of my favorite tools for years. The recipe idea
         | and chaining, plus the crazy list of ingredients is super
         | useful if anybody does CTFs.. much faster than throwing
         | together some bits of Python
        
           | declaredapple wrote:
           | What use cases are you using it for?
           | 
           | I haven't used it a ton, but I've found the UI to be clunkly
           | and somewhat difficult to figure out compared to using the
           | shell with jq
        
             | _xerces_ wrote:
             | I use it for deobfuscation, decryption, base64 en/decode
             | and and sometimes just for converting hex to readable
             | strings or vice versa via copy paste and no effort. It can
             | switch up endianness, sort out network packet data, etc.
             | 
             | For even less effort there is a MAGIC function where you
             | just dump some bytes (sometimes with a from/to hex block
             | first) and it tries to make sense of them for you.
             | 
             | It saves me writing custom C or Python scripts every time I
             | want to manipulate or analyze some data.
        
             | pbhjpbhj wrote:
             | I use it for parsing/formatting out text data instead of
             | Excel because I don't have access to a shell and my
             | JavaScript is rusty enough that it is quicker to put
             | regexes in CyberChef than use jsfiddle. Before I found it I
             | was using an online regex tool for that; simple dedupe, and
             | line counting made it worthwhile shifting.
        
           | EvanAnderson wrote:
           | Same here. I did a CTF last year and spent much of it just
           | sitting in CyberChef.
        
       | signalblur wrote:
       | Don't forget to turn on Geocities mode (Settings > Theme >
       | Geocities)
        
         | 2024throwaway wrote:
         | And don't forget to turn it immediately off.
        
       | EvanAnderson wrote:
       | I find CyberChef immensely when I'm doing RE work that for things
       | that I'd otherwise have to write little snippets of code to do. I
       | can get a lot of the simple text manipulation stuff done w/
       | hexdump, cut, tr, sed, etc. I find CyberChef easier to use when
       | I'm doing operations on binary blobs.
       | 
       | I particularly like easily doing encryption and decryption.
       | Lately I seem to find many "secrets" (database connection
       | strings, API keys, etc) in software I'm RE'ing stored as
       | base64-encoded AES-encrypted blobs w/ the key sitting right
       | beside them as a base64-encoded blob.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related. Others?
       | 
       |  _UK GCHQ 's CyberChef_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38790631 - Dec 2023 (2
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _CyberChef 10_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35265228 -
       | March 2023 (2 comments)
       | 
       |  _CyberChef - The Cyber Swiss Army Knife_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32699420 - Sept 2022 (24
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _CyberChef - The Cyber Swiss Army Knife_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29982286 - Jan 2022 (54
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _CyberChef - Cyber Swiss Army Knife_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20767183 - Aug 2019 (59
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _CyberChef - The Cyber Swiss Army Knife_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543810 - July 2019 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _CyberChef - The Cyber Swiss Army Knife_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099687 - Dec 2016 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _CyberChef - A Cyber Swiss Army Knife_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056254 - Nov 2016 (139
       | comments)
        
       | softblush wrote:
       | Too bad there hasn't been any development at all since July 2023
        
         | 2024throwaway wrote:
         | Is there a feature you're missing?
        
       | mianm wrote:
       | It's always useful to be able to use the operation it can provide
       | to check if your data is a Numberwang.
        
       | billy99k wrote:
       | I use this a lot. Especially for base64 and urlencoding.
        
       | baconhigh wrote:
       | From the last time;
       | 
       | protip: Open the JS console (F12 / inspect) and start the
       | CyberChef challenges!
       | 
       | 43 6f 6e 67 72 61 74 75 6c 61 74 69 6f 6e 73 2c 20 79 6f 75 20 68
       | 61 76 65 20 63 6f 6d 70 6c 65 74 65 64 20 43 79 62 65 72 43 68 65
       | 66 20 63 68 61 6c 6c 65 6e 67 65 20 23 31 21 0a 0a 54 68 69 73 20
       | 63 68 61 6c 6c 65 6e 67 65 20 65 78 70 6c 6f 72 65 64 20 68 65 78
       | 61 64 65 63 69 6d 61 6c 20 65 6e 63 6f 64 69 6e 67 2e 20 54 6f 20
       | 6c 65 61 72 6e 20 6d 6f 72 65 2c 20 76 69 73 69 74 20 77 69 6b 69
       | 70 65 64 69 61 2e 6f 72 67 2f 77 69 6b 69 2f 48 65 78 61 64 65 63
       | 69 6d 61 6c 2e 0a 0a 54 68 65 20 63 6f 64 65 20 66 6f 72 20 74 68
       | 69 73 20 63 68 61 6c 6c 65 6e 67 65 20 69 73 20 39 64 34 63 62 63
       | 65 66 2d 62 65 35 32 2d 34 37 35 31 2d 61 32 62 32 2d 38 33 33 38
       | 65 36 34 30 39 34 31 36 20 28 6b 65 65 70 20 74 68 69 73 20 70 72
       | 69 76 61 74 65 29 2e 0a 0a 54 68 65 20 6e 65 78 74 20 63 68 61 6c
       | 6c 65 6e 67 65 20 63 61 6e 20 62 65 20 66 6f 75 6e 64 20 61 74 20
       | 68 74 74 70 73 3a 2f 2f 70 61 73 74 65 62 69 6e 2e 63 6f 6d 2f 47
       | 53 6e 54 41 6d 6b 56 2e
        
       | edm0nd wrote:
       | I keep this open for usage during CTFs.
       | 
       | Its freaking awesome!
        
       | tamimio wrote:
       | I use Ciphey instead in any reverse engineering stuff, far
       | better.
       | 
       | https://github.com/ciphey/ciphey
        
       | markus_zhang wrote:
       | Thinking about write one but for native. There are a lot of web
       | based ones already.
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-01 23:01 UTC)