Hex Editing using HxD

Nick Fogal & Lindsay Shaffer

 Purpose
• A user is able to see and edit raw and exact
content of a file. It is also able to modify the
binary data that makes up the file. The data
of the computer file is usually represented in a
hexadecimal format.
 Environment
• HxD works in the Windows environment from
Windows 95 – Windows 7
• Some features may require administrator
privileges
 How it works
• You select a file you want to open
• You are able to view the bytes of a specific file in
hexadecimal, decimal, or octal format.
• HxD also dumps a display of ASCII format of the
file
• You can also compare two files to see differences
in size and changes in bytes of the two files
• You can also shred selected files from your hard
drive
 Output
• The file dumps the binary data of the selected file
and outputs this data in a hexadecimal, decimal,
or octal format
• The data of file is also displayed in ASCII format
• When comparing two files the results come back
as identical if both files have the same data
• Otherwise if both files contain different data you
can compare the hex values of the two files
 Experience
• Depending on your skills of data types it could
be pretty easy to use or hard to use
• HxD was really easy to install because it comes
packed into a ZIP file. The executable file just
needs to be extracted from the ZIP file
• HxD did not come with much documentation.
We pretty much learned the tool by testing
 Problems
• We had to learn the features of the tool
ourselves. There was not many tutorials
available.
• Some of the files we opened we were not able
to modify because of the source code. We did
not know what was being shown from the Hex
or ASCII values