I never realized it was a UK governemnt agency developing this !
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!
CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
#12How did I not know about this until just now? VERY cool. I'll definitely be using this going forward!
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
Re: CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
#13I never realized it was a UK governemnt agency developing this !
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/ [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…
Actually the NSA is the US’s version of GCHQ.
Re: CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
#14How did I not know about this until just now? VERY cool. I'll definitely be using this going forward!
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
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
Re: CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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
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.
Re: CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
#16I 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.
Re: CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
#17How did I not know about this until just now? VERY cool. I'll definitely be using this going forward!
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
Same here. I did a CTF last year and spent much of it just sitting in CyberChef.
Re: CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
#18Related. 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)
Re: CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
#19I never realized it was a UK governemnt agency developing this !
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/ [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…
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
Re: CyberChef from GCHQ: Cyber Swiss Army Knife
#20Too bad there hasn't been any development at all since July 2023