No more dumb hex!

Hex viewers and editors are useful, they “just work”, but they are very limited. This talk introduces new perspectives and tools for dissecting, visualizing and editing binary files.

Typically there are 2 ways to deal with analyzing binary files: extract metadata, or the good old hex/ascii view at best combined with some parsing, which adds coloring and a tree structure with metadata. The universal hex/ascii view has many limits - it’s ok for viewing, but quite bad for editing, and metadata listing is disconnected from the binary representation, and offers no ways to edit or rebuild the file.

This talk introduces a different approach, which consists in dissecting any file to a specific syntax that guarantees that the file can be rebuilt easily, which makes analysis and manipulations easier, shareable, comparable.

It also introduces a new graphical library to render binary files as SVG visualisations, either generically - applying to all files - or specifically to some file formats, hopefully bringing better binary visualisation to every parsers with little overhead.

About the Speakers