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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

CyberChef is really useful, and it runs locally, so you never have to send your sensitive data to some random server anymore. The “recipes” feature is quite powerful, too, but I think my favorite thing about it is that I can often just paste random data in and run the “Magic” script and it’ll try to guess the data format for me.

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> you never have to send your sensitive data to some random server anymore

If you live in the UK you are already sending one entire month of your full personal communications, and three months of your communications metadata, to this government organisation. Pardon the off-topic rant.

Do we have decent reason to believe this is no longer the case for US citizens and the NSA, post-Snowden?

No. No meaningful reforms happened. The secret domestic warrantless surveillance infrastructure that exists in 2024 is either far more technically impressive or terrifying than the equivalent in place in 2013, depending on your perspective.

What do you mean? All my personal communication is encrypted.

Not unless you self sign everything

You say "police state", I say "government subsidized backups".

They won't let you FIO them though..

Unfortunately write only backups from one's own perspective.

Interesting, where are those exact timeframes declared at?

Is the Magic function anything like running `file` on a Linux/Mac?

It uses a combination of magic bytes (like the `file` command), entropy analysis and character frequency detection to determine whether an output is likely to be of interest to the user.

The file type mechanism is written here[0]. There's a list of all signatures we detect here[1]. The magic implementation is here[2].

[0] https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/blob/master/src/core/lib/F... [1] https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/blob/master/src/core/lib/F... [2] https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/blob/master/src/core/lib/M...

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