What is CyberChef?
CyberChef calls itself 'The Cyber Swiss Army Knife'. It is a web app built by GCHQ, the UK intelligence agency, that handles hundreds of small data jobs such as Base64 and hex conversion, hashing, XOR, AES and other ciphers, compression, timestamp parsing and regular expression extraction.
You drag operations into a recipe, paste your input, and see the output update live. The Magic operation tries to detect layers of encoding for you. All processing happens in your browser, so data is not sent to a server, and the project is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. You can also download a copy to run offline.
Main Features
- Hundreds of encoding, crypto and data operations
- Drag-and-drop recipes that chain steps
- Magic auto-detection of encodings
- Share recipes and input by URL
- Runs fully in the browser
- Downloadable for offline use
How to Get Started with CyberChef
- Open gchq.github.io/CyberChef in your browser.
- Search the Operations list, for example 'From Base64'.
- Drag the operation into the Recipe column.
- Paste your data into Input and read the result in Output.
CyberChef Pricing
CyberChef is completely free and open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. There are no paid plans.
Who Should Use It?
- Security analysts and CTF players
- Developers debugging encoded data
- Incident responders
- Students learning about encoding and crypto
- Sysadmins handling logs and tokens
CyberChef Alternatives
- Regex101: Online tester that explains and debugs regular expressions.
- Can I Use: Browser support tables for web platform features.
- Squoosh: Free in-browser image compressor from Google.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CyberChef free?
Yes. It is free and open source, with no paid tier.
Is my data sent anywhere?
No. Recipes and input are processed in your browser and are not sent to the web server.
Can I use CyberChef offline?
Yes. You can download a full copy and run it locally, including on closed networks.