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

Binwalk's core features will work out of the box without any additional dependencies. However, to take advantage of binwalk's graphing and extraction capabilities, multiple supporting utilities/packages need to be installed.

To ease "dependency hell", a shell script named deps.sh is included which attempts to install all required dependencies for Debian and RedHat based systems:

$ ./deps.sh

If you are running a different system, or prefer to install these dependencies manually, see the Dependencies section below.

Dependencies

The following 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:

libqt4-opengl 
python-opengl 
python-qt4 
python-qt4-gl 
python-numpy 
python-scipy

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

mtd-utils
zlib1g-dev
liblzma-dev
ncompress
gzip
bzip2
tar
arj
p7zip
cabextract
p7zip-full
openjdk-6-jdk
firmware-mod-kit [https://code.google.com/p/firmware-mod-kit]

Bundled Software

For convenience, the following libraries are bundled with binwalk and will not conflict with system-wide libraries:

libmagic
libfuzzy
pyqtgraph

Installation of any individual bundled library can be disabled at build time:

$ ./configure --disable-libmagic --disable-libfuzzy --disable-pyqtgraph

Alternatively, installation of all bundled libraries can be disabled at build time:

$ ./configure --disable-bundles

If a bundled library is disabled, the equivalent library must be installed to a standard system library location (e.g., /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, etc) in order for binwalk to function properly.

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

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

Uninstallation

The following command will remove binwalk from your system. Note that this will not remove manually installed packages, or utilities installed via deps.sh:

$ sudo make uninstall