# gchq/CyberChef

The Cyber Swiss Army Knife - a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis

Repository: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/cyberchef
Homepage: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef
Language: JavaScript
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: data-analysis, data-manipulation, encryption, encoding, compression, parsing, hashing
Last push: 2026-08-21T02:06:22+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 98/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 98, release rhythm 98, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3565, "days_push": 13, "days_rel": 15, "gap_med": 20, "n_releases_24m": 12}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 35679, forks 4112 (observed 2026-08-28T04:12:00.887604+00:00)

## What it is
CyberChef is a browser-based web application for performing a wide range of 'cyber' operations such as encryption, encoding, compression, hashing, and data parsing. It lets users chain operations into recipes to manipulate and analyze data without writing code.

## Use cases
- decode a base64 string
- encrypt and decrypt data with AES
- calculate hashes and checksums of a file
- parse an X.509 certificate
- convert data to hexdump or binary
- decompress gzip data in the browser
- analyze suspicious encoded payloads
- change character encodings of text

## When to choose
- you need quick one-off encoding, encryption, or data transformation without installing tools
- you want a visual, recipe-based way to chain data operations
- you need an offline-capable tool for sensitive data analysis
- both technical and non-technical analysts must manipulate data

## When to avoid
- you need programmatic automation at scale in a backend pipeline
- you require very large dataset processing beyond browser memory limits
- you need a dedicated, audited cryptographic implementation for production security

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: active
- function: cryptography, serialization, parser, compression, security, developer-tools, web-scraping
- domain: security, developer-tools, data-science, privacy, reverse-engineering
- platform: browser, self-hosted, cross-platform
- tags: data-manipulation, encoding, hashing, base64, hexdump, swiss-army-knife, offline-web-app, ctf-tools, data-analysis, web-server, docker, nodejs

## Member repositories
- gchq/CyberChef (main) score 98

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:12:00.887604+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T16:26:45.691980+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef (fetched 2026-08-28T04:12:00.887604+00:00, sha ac580824d222)
  - homepage: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef (fetched 2026-08-29T07:48:15.907067+00:00, sha 340c274fe86e)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.