Bintext 3.00 by Robin Keir

[__philippe]

Bintext 3.00 by Robin Keir (tested under winXP - NOT tested under Win7)

A small (35k), very fast and powerful GUI text extractor / scanner that will be of particular interest to programmers,
but also to anyone interested in ferreting out character strings buried within binary files.

Bintext can extract text from any kind of file and will find and display plain ASCII text, Unicode (double byte ANSI) text
and Resource strings, providing useful information for each item in the optional "Advanced" mode

Notably, it also shows both the file offset and the memory offset of each string found. This is no mean feat :
images have different file and memory alignment values, and juggling the two is a very nice (and not so easy) refinement.

Recommended download for Bintext 3.0 version (see why hereunder):
http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/do ... intext.zip

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Historical Note about Bintext versions.

Most of Rob Keir original utilities were developed while working for McAfee/Foundstone
They are now owned by McAfee and provided free of charge as part of McAfee
"Forensic Free Tools" archive.

http://www.mcafee.com/us/downloads/free-tools/

When McAfee acquired most of Rob Keir's utilities (then owned by Foundstone), they swiftly injected their own copyright byline
in Rob's utilities, unaware they were mistakenly re-branding early versions, thereby reintroducing old bugs in their archived versions.

For instance, McAfee archived version of Bintext (3.03) is a defective regression of Keir's own ultimate good version, namely (3.00)

McAfee defective Bintext version (3.03) reintroduces an old bug ("Duplicated data in Advanced mode")
which was corrected by Rob Keir since version (2.08), and is still correct up to (3.00).

Bintext (3.03) is also missing the informative changelog file present in Keir's original (3.00) zip archive

So, user beware !

Cheers,

__philippe

[__philippe]

I have just submitted my first Entry in the DB for BinText 3.00
Since I have been using it exclusively under WinXP so far, would someone volunteer to test it as well under Win7/32 ?

http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/do ... intext.zip

Thanks,

__philippe

PS
I just noticed a few typos in my first entry, such as the (uncompressed) size displayed as 35B instead of 35k, and also some poorly formatted lines.
How does one edit "Private" entries mistakes in the DB ?

Ooops, ...just noticed the "Edit this Entry" button staring me in the face...

[I am Baas]

TPFC entry is at http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2506

Tested on Win 7 64.

Edited the database entry + voted.

[__philippe]

Thanks to Baas for validating BinText under Win7, cleaning up my DB entry, and voting...

Cheers,

__philippe

[webfork]

Could someone please consolidate the categories with this entry or at least provide some justification for them? I don't think it fits into all of these:

Files - Scanner (1)
Files - Search (17)
Files - Strings Search (1)
Files - Text Extractor (1)
Programming - Resource Tools (11)
Security - Forensic Tools (2)
Security - Privacy Tools (41)

[__philippe]

Limiting the categories descriptor to the generic "Files - Search (17)" category would be ambiguous in this case,
due to the dual meaning of Searching "for File names" as opposed to Searching "Within Files" .

Since the primary purpose of BinText is to extract character strings buried deep down binary files,
"Files -> Strings search" and "Files -> Text Extractor" seemed to be apt new categories descriptors.

As for the Security classification, this tool was originally developed precisely to help in malware forensic analysis.

OTH, "Files -> Scanner" might be misinterpreted (open to confusion with OCR scanner), and probably best dropped from the category list.

__philippe

[SYSTEM]

I removed BinText from all categories except Files - Strings Search and Security - Forensic Tools.

[__philippe]

Forgot to mention BinText will also prominently highlight every Resource object found in the analyzed file,
hence the justified original inclusion in the "Programming - Resource Tools (11)" category.

__philippe

[webfork]

I removed BinText from all categories except Files - Strings Search and Security - Forensic Tools.

Thanks SYSTEM

Forgot to mention BinText will also prominently highlight every Resource object found in the analyzed file, hence the justified original inclusion in the "Programming - Resource Tools (11)" category.

No problem - I also modified the text, hopefully an improvement.

[__philippe]

Here is an old (2006) but interesting narrative about using Bintext for viewing Unicode strings in executables.

http://blog.didierstevens.com/2006/07/0 ... ecutables/

__philippe