CyberChef by gchq
The Cyber Swiss Army Knife - a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis
About CyberChef
From the project's README at github.com/gchq/CyberChef. Lightly cleaned for readability; for the full source see the upstream repo.
[](https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/actions?query=workflow%3A%22Master+Build%2C+Test+%26+Deploy%22) [](https://www.npmjs.com/package/cyberchef) [](https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/blob/master/LICENSE) [](https://gitter.im/gchq/CyberChef?utmsource=badge&utmmedium=badge&utmcampaign=pr-badge) The Cyber Swiss Army Knife*
CyberChef is a simple, intuitive web app for carrying out all manner of "cyber" operations within a web browser. These operations include simple encoding like XOR and Base64, more complex encryption like AES, DES and Blowfish, creating binary and hexdumps, compression and decompression of data, calculating hashes and checksums, IPv6 and X.509 parsing, changing character encodings, and much more.
The tool is designed to enable both technical and non-technical analysts to manipulate data in complex ways without having to deal with complex tools or algorithms. It was conceived, designed, built and incrementally improved by an analyst in their 10% innovation time over several years. Live demo
CyberChef is still under active development. As a result, it shouldn't be considered a finished product. There is still testing and bug fixing to do, new features to be added and additional
Health score breakdown
6-dimension composite. See methodology for formula and weights.
Adoption signals
Real-world usage data, pulled from each registry. The bigger the numbers, the more battle-tested the project.
| Signal | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | 35k | github.com/gchq/CyberChef |
| GitHub forks | 3.9k | github.com/gchq/CyberChef |
| NPM downloads (last month) | 11k | cyberchef |
Release & maintenance
Is this project actively maintained, or about to die? Check the recency of last commit and last release.
| Project age | 9.4 years | since Nov 2016 |
| Last commit | 6 days ago | May 1, 2026 |
| Releases shipped | 454 | last: 9 days ago |
| Security policy | SECURITY.md | declared by maintainers |
Self-hosting cost across providers
Detected requirements: 4GB RAM, 40GB disk minimum. Cheapest plan per provider that meets the requirement.
| Provider | Plan | Specs | Monthly | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| hetzner | CAX11 | 2c · 4GB · 40GB | $4.13 USD | Deploy → |
| vultr | VC2 | 1c · 1GB · 25GB | $5 USD | Deploy → |
| linode | Nanode 1GB | 1c · 1GB · 25GB | $5.12 USD | Deploy → |
| digitalocean | Basic Regular 1GB | 1c · 1GB · 25GB | $6 USD | Deploy → |
Security advisories
GHSA-h4hv-92pp-pcjg. What people say on Hacker News
Ready to self-host CyberChef?
Spin up a hetzner CAX11 (4GB RAM, 40GB disk) for $4.13/mo and follow the project's official install docs.
Data last refreshed May 7, 2026.
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