VirusTotal/yara-x

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1260 stars · 149 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

YARA-X is a pure Rust rewrite of YARA, the pattern matching swiss knife for malware researchers, designed to be faster, safer, and more user-friendly. It lets users write rules combining textual or binary patterns with boolean logic to identify malware families or other file characteristics, with APIs for C/C++, Python, and Go.

Use cases

• scan files for malware family signatures with YARA rules
• write pattern matching rules for binary and text patterns
• integrate YARA rule scanning into a Python or Go application
• migrate existing YARA rules to a faster engine
• perform digital forensics file triage at scale
• match regular expressions and hex patterns in files

When to choose

• you need fast, battle-tested YARA-compatible pattern matching in production
• you want memory-safe Rust implementation with C/C++, Python, or Go APIs
• you are starting new malware research or file classification workflows

When to avoid

• you rely on YARA features or modules not yet supported by YARA-X
• you depend on legacy tooling tightly coupled to original YARA behavior

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser search-engine cli sdk security developer-tools windows rust python go cross-platform yara pattern-matching malware-analysis cybersecurity forensics rust-rewrite command-line linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="VirusTotal/yara-x")