CyberChef vs xortool
GitHub Stats
About CyberChef
CyberChef is a web application developed by GCHQ for carrying out all manner of cyber operations within a web browser. It provides over 300 operations covering encoding/decoding (Base64, URL, hex, HTML entities), encryption/decryption (AES, DES, RSA, XOR), compression (gzip, bzip2, zlib), hashing (MD5, SHA, HMAC), data format conversion (JSON, XML, CSV, YAML), networking (IP parsing, URL parsing, HTTP headers), language operations (regex, character encoding, Unicode), and analysis (entropy, frequency, magic detection). Operations are chained together in a visual 'recipe' that processes data through each step sequentially, making it easy to build complex transformation pipelines. CyberChef's 'Magic' operation automatically detects the encoding or format of input data and suggests relevant operations. It runs entirely client-side - no data leaves the browser - making it safe for processing sensitive material. CyberChef is an essential daily tool for SOC analysts, malware researchers, and CTF players.
About xortool
xortool is a Python-based cryptanalysis tool that analyzes and breaks multi-byte XOR cipher encrypted data by performing statistical analysis to determine the most probable key length and key values. It uses character frequency analysis, key length estimation through coincidence counting, and known-plaintext assumptions to recover encryption keys without brute force. CTF participants, malware analysts, and cryptography researchers use xortool to quickly defeat XOR-based obfuscation, which remains one of the most common lightweight encryption schemes found in malware, data encoding, and CTF challenges. The tool can process raw binary files, hex-encoded data, and text input, outputting recovered keys and decrypted plaintext with probability rankings for each candidate.
Platform Support
Tags
CyberChef only
xortool only