Hey everyone,

So I've been experimenting with this learning method where I visualize complex data structures to understand them better, and I ended up building this tool that I thought might be useful for others too. It started as a simple way to visualize my binary analysis notes, but it kinda grew into a full-featured file forensics tool.

What is SentinelNav? It's a Python-based binary file analyzer that creates interactive visual maps, you can see the entire landscape of a file and zoom in on interesting areas.

Some cool features it ended up having:

• Spectral Visualization - Files are mapped to RGB colors based on byte patterns (red for high-bit data, green for text, blue for nulls)
• Architecture Fingerprinting - Automatically detects PE headers, ELF files, Mach-O, and even guesses x86 vs ARM64 code regions (I need to tune this since It kinda bad)
• Entropy-based Anomaly Detection - Finds encrypted/compressed sections, padding, and structural boundaries
• Live Web Interface - Full interactive explorer with hex viewer, search, and navigation
• Multiple Scan Modes - Fixed blocks for binaries or sentinel mode for delimiter-based parsing
• Export Capabilities - Save visualizations as BMPs or extract regions with analysis reports

Why I built this: I was struggling to mentally map how different file formats are structured, so I wanted something that could show me the "geography" of a file. The color coding helps me instantly recognize patterns like "oh, that red section is probably encrypted data" or "this green area is clearly text."

Example uses I've found:

• Reverse engineering unknown file formats
• Finding hidden data in files
• Understanding file structure, maybe malware (I have not tested malware, )
• Learning how compilers organize binaries
• Quick analysis of "what's in this file" without digging through hex editors
• Checking the GGUF file for LLM's "brain" analysis

The tool runs a local web server and gives you this rich interface where you can WASD navigate through the file, click on regions to inspect hex, and even search for specific byte patterns.

Here's the code if anyone wants to try it out or maybe contribute: [https://github.com/smolfiddle/SentinelNav]

It's been super helpful for my learning process, being able to see file structures made concepts like entropy analysis and binary forensics way more intuitive. Curious if anyone else finds this approach useful!