CyberChef

Are you a l33t h@x0r? Do you need the right tools at your fingertips to support your #masterhacker skillz? Look no further than CyberChef, lovingly baked for you by your friends at GHCQ¹!

CyberChef Screenshot

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 or 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.

Here are some examples of fancy hax0r tricks you can do with CyberChef:

Here's a live demo!

CyberChef Requirements

Ingredients

Already deployed:

Docker swarm cluster with persistent shared storage
Traefik configured per design
DNS entry for the hostname you intend to use (or a wildcard), pointed to your keepalived IP

Traefik Forward Auth or Authelia to secure your Traefik-exposed services with an additional layer of authentication

Preparation

CyberChef Docker Swarm config

CyberChef doesn't require any persistent storage, or fancy configuration, so simply create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like the example below:

Fast-track with premix! 🚀

"Premix" is a git repository which includes necessary docker-compose and env files for all published recipes. This means that you can launch any recipe with just a git pull and a docker stack deploy 👍.

🚀 Update: Premix now includes an ansible playbook, enabling you to deploy an entire stack + recipes, with a single ansible command! (more here)

version: "3.2" # https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-versioning/#version-3

services:
  cyberchef:
    image: mpepping/cyberchef
    deploy:
      labels:
        # traefik
        - traefik.enable=true
        - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public

        # traefikv1
        - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:cyberchef.example.com
        - traefik.port=8000     

        # traefikv2
        - "traefik.http.routers.cyberchef.rule=Host(`cyberchef.example.com`)"
        - "traefik.http.routers.cyberchef.entrypoints=https"
        - "traefik.http.services.cyberchef.loadbalancer.server.port=8000"           
    networks:
      - traefik_public

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true

Serving

Cyber the Chef!

Launch your CyberChef stack by running docker stack deploy cyberchef -c <path -to-docker-compose.yml>, and then visit the URL you chose to begin the hackery!

Chef's notes 📓

Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence and information assurance to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom ↩

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Employ your chef (engage) 🤝

Is this too much of a geeky PITA? Do you just want results, stat? I do this for a living - I'm a full-time Kubernetes contractor, providing consulting and engineering expertise to businesses needing short-term, short-notice support in the cloud-native space, including AWS/Azure/GKE, Kubernetes, CI/CD and automation.

Learn more about working with me here.

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