Author: sp

# Views: 2065

I finally got around to write an example plugin for my hex editor Hexer to show how simple it is to extend Hexer according to your own needs. The Java plugin I am going to present calculates the entropy of files according to the method presented on Ero Carreras blog. The plugin adds a new tab containing a line chart and a button to the File Statistics dialog. When the user clicks the button, the entropy of the active file (that is the file in the last active hex window) is calculated and shown in the line chart. The screenshot below shows the entropy distribution of Notepad.exe.

You can download the source file of the plugin here. The archive contains the source file EntropyCalculator.java as well as two class files which were created by compiling the source file using Java 1.6. To install the plugin, simply copy the two class files to the plugins directory of your Hexer installation. Since the plugin uses the JFreeChart library to display the graph it is also necessary to get the files jcommon-1.0.12.jar and jfreechart-1.0.9.jar from the JFreeChart package. Copy those files into the jars directory of your Hexer installation.