This collection of public utilities will be useful for the exploration of binary data.
HexLasso Online
With HexLasso Online you can visually explore the structure of binary data to spot varying redundancies. You can choose between many analyzers to spot blocks of specific bytes, strings, runs of bytes, matches and code fragments.
Binwalk
Binwalk is commonly used for firmware analysis. With a diverse set of signatures built-in to recognize compressed stream, executable code, cryptographic markers and so on, you can use Binwalk to scan arbitrary binaries.
Visual analysis of binary files
Binvis.io is an interactive online utility for the visual exploration of binary data.
BinVis
BinVis (not to be confused with binvis.io which was developed by another author) is a binary file visualization prototype supporting many plots including byte plot, bit plot, RGB plot, entropy plot, and so on.
binocle
binocle is a graphical tool to visualize binary data. It colorizes bytes according to different rules and renders them as pixels in a rectangular grid.
hobbits from Mahlet-Inc
hobbits is a multi-platform GUI for bit-based analysis, processing, and visualization.
Strings
Strings scans the input binary for ASCII and Unicode texts.
byte-stats.py of Didier Stevens Suite
byte-stats.py is a tool that computes byte-level statistics for files.
binGraph
binGraph is a command line tool to plot entropy and histogram charts of binary data.
entroPy
entroPy visualizes the entropy of binary data in bird eye view that the darker an area the lower entropy it has.
The many hex editors
Free and commercial hex editors.
HexEd.it
HexEd.it is an online hex editor with data inspector.
ImHex
ImHex is an open source hex editor with rich feature set including disassembler support and night mode.
Deepmage
Deepmage is a hex editor that can handle data in units of arbitrary bit width.
hexyl, hexsa
They are hex viewers that produce hex dumps in colors to distinguish different categories of bytes.
HexWalk
HexWalk is an open-source hex editor/viewer and analyzer based on qhexedit2, binwalk and QT.
Multidiff
Multidiff compares multiple binary files.
FV program
FV program is a well-known utility in the compression development industry. It is used to visualize the matches in the data. There is a reference to FV in the Data Compression Explained book.
DataSmoke
DataSmoke aims to distinguish different data types (in order to choose the best compression method). It has multiple short algorithms and some are based on entropy calculation.
ent – A Pseudorandom Number Sequence Test Program
Ent tests the randomness of the content of a file. It uses various algorithms including entropy, chi-squared test, arithmetic mean, correlation coefficient, and so on.
file2img
file2img interprets the content of the given file as image with the option to select the pixel format.
Dump2Picture
Dump2Picture adds a BMP header to arbitrary file. The result can be viewed as an image.
QuickBMS
QuickBMS allows to extract content from compressed and encryped file formats.
Signsrch
Signsrch scans files to recognize compressed stream, encryption, checksum, and so on. It uses an external signature file.
NIST Statistical Test Suite
This research project can be useful to learn about approaches to analyze binary data.
Feel free to send an email about other valuable utilities on the topic.