Veles is a neat data visualization tool which helps you take advantage of human pattern recognition. It plus tuples (or triples) of the bytes of files as dots on a 2D X/Y plane (or 3D XYZ space), and the patterns that emerge can immediately give away what kind of data is in the file.

Unfortunately, Veles seems to be a little old and I can’t find an actively maintained fork or any descendant. The lineage seems to be:

  1. ..cantordust.. from xoreaxeaxeax (Chris Domas) is shown at BlackHat
  2. Everyone wants it but it’s not released to the public for many years later
  3. Codilime writes and open-sources Veles
  4. Wapiflapi writes and open-sources binglide
  5. Wapiflapi forks codilime Veles and integrates as few ideas from binglide as well as some updates from the upstream Codilime version
  6. Codilime makes a few more updates but eventually archives the repo in 2020

The wapiflapi Veles is the only version I could get to build, mostly following the repo’s build steps:

Deb builds might work

I think the codilime repo has a .deb file on the releases page — it may work for Debian-based systems. I haven’t tried, as I’m doing this on a Gentoo machine, but if you’re on Debian or any deriviative of it, worth a shot!

https://github.com/codilime/veles/releases/tag/2018.05.0.TIF

  1. Clone the repo
  2. mkdir build
  3. Edit CMakeLists.txt, punch out the if(GTEST_FOUND) (line 223) and replace with if(0) to prevent tests from building (they don’t)
  4. cd build
  5. cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM=3.5 ..
  6. make

Then launch with ./veles.

See also

The working Git repo: https://github.com/wapiflapi/veles

sre