I use CyberChef daily for malware analysis, programming, and CTF challenges.

Installing CyberChef locally can be handy for general privacy and OPSEC reasons. A local installation also works without internet connectivity.

The main drawback of using CyberChef locally is that sharing recipes and data you have decoded with your teammates isn’t as straightforward as copying and pasting your address bar’s contents into a chat application.

If you require this sort of collaboration but do not wish to share your data with the owners of a public CyberChef instance, it may be beneficial to deploy a private instance for your team.

Download a Release

The latest CyberChef releases can be downloaded here: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/releases

At the time of this writing, the current release is v9.28.0.

Create Directory

Next, create a directory to extract CyberChef into. To keep things organized, I opted into using /opt.

sudo mkdir -p /opt/CyberChef/v9.28.0

Extract Release

Unzip CyberChef into the directory you just created.

sudo unzip -d /opt/CyberChef/v9.28.0/

Open CyberChef With Your Browser

In this directory, there should be a file named CyberChef_v9.28.0.html. Open this file with your browser.

I did this by typing the following into my address bar:

file:///opt/CyberChef/v9.28.0/CyberChef_v9.28.0.html

At this point, you should have a working CyberChef installation on your system. Since I use it so often, I bookmarked it, but this isn’t necessary.