CyberChef
The Cyber Swiss Army Knife
CyberChef is a web application for encryption, encoding, compression, and data analysis developed by GCHQ. It’s like a Swiss Army knife for data transformations.
Key Features
- 300+ operations
- Drag-and-drop recipe builder
- Base64, hex, binary encoding
- Encryption and hashing
- Data format conversion
- Network analysis tools
Why I Use It
CyberChef is one of those tools that shows up constantly once you know it exists. In CTFs it’s indispensable — chaining together base64 decodes, XOR operations, hex conversions, and hash lookups into a single recipe is exactly the kind of thing that turns a frustrating challenge into a solved one. Outside of CTFs I reach for it whenever I need to quickly inspect or manipulate data: decoding a JWT, analyzing a suspicious string, converting between formats, or just checking what an encoded blob actually says. The recipe system is what makes it so powerful — you can build up multi-step transformations visually and reuse them. Having it self-hosted means I’m not pasting anything sensitive into a public instance.
Links: GitHub · Official Site