Before You Start

Binwalk supports Python 2.7 - 3.x. 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 Python installation procedure:

$ sudo python setup.py install

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:

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

# Install sasquatch to extract non-standard SquashFS images
$ sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev liblzo2-dev
$ git clone https://github.com/devttys0/sasquatch
$ (cd sasquatch && make && sudo make install)

Installing the IDA Plugin

If IDA is installed on your system, you may optionally install the binwalk IDA plugin by simply copying the src/scripts/binida.py file into IDA's plugins directory.