I have been working on analysing binary files (such as firmware files) for well over a decade now. In the first few years I did this mostly by hand using standard Linux tools but since late 2009 I have been working on (and with) tools . While working on tools I have been hearing from some people that the problems I try to solve are bordering on the trivial and I can just use the standard tools and libraries and just glue them together with some custom code. But that has actually not been my experience. Although for most of the files out there it would indeed be as simple as using standard tools to read and verify the files it gets a lot more complicated as soon as you start working with blobs where you don't know where files begin or start. As an example: I often encounter firmware update files for embedded Linux devices, where it really depends on the vendor what the format looks like. Sometimes the firmware is the same size as the flash chip and I don't know where the par...