Before You Start

Binwalk supports Python 2.7 - 3.x. Although binwalk is slightly faster in Python 3, the Python OpenGL bindings are still experimental for Python 3, so Python 2.7 is recommended.

The following installation procedures assume that you are installing binwalk to be run using Python 2.7. If you want to use binwalk in Python 3, some package names and installation procedures may differ slightly.

Installation

Installation follows the typical configure/make process (standard development tools such as gcc, make, and Python must be installed in order to build):

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Many features will work out of the box without any additional dependencies. However, to take advantage of binwalk's more advanced capabilities, multiple supporting utilities/packages need to be installed (see the Dependencies section below).

Dependencies

Binwalk's only required run-time dependencies are libmagic and python-lzma:

$ sudo apt-get install libmagic1 python-lzma

Note that the libmagic development package is not required, and almost all Linux systems will already have libmagic installed. Additionally, python-lzma is a standard package in Python3, and thus requires no additional installation if running binwalk in Python3.

The remaining run-time dependencies are only required for optional binwalk features, such as file extraction and graphing capabilities. Unless otherwise specified, these dependencies are available from most Linux package managers.

Binwalk uses pyqtgraph to generate graphs and visualizations, which requires the following:

$ sudo apt-get install libqt4-opengl python-opengl python-qt4 python-qt4-gl python-numpy python-scipy python-pip
$ sudo pip install pyqtgraph

Binwalk's --disasm option requires the Capstone disassembly framework and its corresponding Python bindings:

$ wget http://www.capstone-engine.org/download/2.1.2/capstone-2.1.2.tgz
$ tar -zxvf capstone-2.1.2.tgz
$ (cd capstone-2.1.2 && ./make.sh && sudo make install)
$ (cd capstone-2.1.2/bindings/python && sudo python ./setup.py install)

Binwalk relies on multiple external utilties in order to automatically extract/decompress files and data:

$ sudo apt-get install mtd-utils zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev ncompress gzip bzip2 tar arj lhasa p7zip p7zip-full cabextract openjdk-6-jdk cramfsprogs cramfsswap squashfs-tools

$ git clone https://github.com/devttys0/sasquatch
$ (cd sasquatch && make && sudo make install)

Bundled Software

For convenience, the following libraries are bundled with the binwalk source:

libmagic

By default, libmagic is not built or installed unless explicitly enabled during the build process:

$ ./configure --enable-libmagic

By default, it is assumed that the libmagic library is already installed to a standard system library location (e.g., /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, etc) in order for binwalk to find it at run time.

Note: If the bundled libmagic library is not used, be aware that:

1. Some versions of libmagic have known bugs that are triggered by binwalk under some circumstances.
2. Minor version releases of libmagic may not be backwards compatible with each other and installation of the wrong version of libmagic may cause binwalk to fail to function properly.
3. Conversely, updating libmagic to a version that works with binwalk may cause other utilities that rely on libmagic to fail.

Currently, the following libmagic versions are known to work properly with binwalk (other versions may or may not work):

5.18
5.19
5.20

Specifying a Python Interpreter

The default python interpreter used during install is the system-wide python interpreter. A different interpreter (e.g., python2, python3) can be specified at build time:

$ ./configure --with-python=python3

Installing the IDA Plugin

If IDA is installed on your system, you may optionally install the IDA plugin by specifying the location of your IDA install directory at build time:

$ ./configure --with-ida=/home/user/ida-6.6
$ make ida

Or, simply copy the src/scripts/binida.py file into IDA's plugins directory.

Uninstallation

The following command will remove binwalk from your system. Note that this will not remove manually installed packages or tools:

$ sudo make uninstall