bloodyad
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Active DirectoryActive DirectoryMicrosoft's directory service for Windows networks that centralises authentication and authorisation; cyber tools target or integrate with it because it controls identity and access across most enterprise environments. privilege escalationprivilege escalationGaining permissions beyond those an account or process initially had. It can turn limited access into administrator control or access to another user's resources. tool that performs LDAPLDAPA protocol for querying and modifying directory services, standardized under RFC 4511, commonly used to look up users, groups, and attributes in corporate identity stores like Active Directory. calls to a domain controller, supporting cleartext, pass-the-hash, pass-the-ticket, and certificat
Summary
bloodyAD is an open-source command-line tool for Active Directory privilege escalation, used by red teamers and penetration testers working against domain controllers. It issues LDAP calls to perform privesc actions such as resetting passwords, authenticating with cleartext credentials, pass-the-hash, pass-the-ticket, or certificates, and it can operate over a SOCKSSOCKSA proxy protocol that relays TCP (and optionally UDP) connections through an intermediary server, letting cyber tools route traffic through a pivot host or anonymizing layer without needing raw network access. proxy for use from a pivot point inside a network. Its README describes it as an Active Directory privilege escalation swiss army knife, placing it in the same space as PowerView and impacket's LDAP attack scripts, both of which it credits as influences, though it runs as a single binary rather than a PowerShell script or library. First committed in 2021, it has 23 contributors and a release 16 days ago, with steady activity over the past year.
Active Directory privilege escalation tool that performs LDAP calls to a domain controller, supporting cleartext, pass-the-hash, pass-the-ticket, and certificat
How bloodyad helps
Which accounts on this domain controller can I take over without ever having a plaintext password?
authenticates using a captured hash, a ticket, or a certificate instead, and from there resets or sets a target account's password over LDAP
Can I get a foothold on this domain from a machine that only has network access through a compromised pivot?
binds to the domain controller's LDAP service through a SOCKS proxy, so the privesc calls run from the pivot point without needing a direct route
Which privilege escalation path actually works against this specific domain controller right now?
issues the real LDAP calls for each technique (password resets, delegation abuse, DNS record changes) and reports back what the directory accepted or rejected, rather than just listing theoretical paths
Is this environment's traffic exposed if LDAPS isn't enforced?
can exchange credentials and commands over plain LDAP when LDAPS isn't available, so the same actions still work rather than failing closed
Which AD DNS records can I plant or alter to redirect traffic in this domain?
carries DNS attack functionality modeled on known AD DNS abuse tools, letting a tester add or modify records through the same LDAP-based interface
Languages
Command line
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for bloodyad, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail bloodyad puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in CravateRouge/bloodyAD, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 13 +6 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 22 days first maintainer reply 38 hours
- Open backlog 3 of 89 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 3
- Contributors / month 2
- Commits / month 2
- Stars 2,300
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Articles
2 articles · updated Nov 4, 2026Where bloodyad turns up in what others publish: how-tos, attack reports that name it, and incident write-ups. A row says why it is here and quotes where the article names it; the link goes to the publisher.
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Active Directory Penetration Testing with BloodyAD
Table of Contents Introduction About BloodyAD Active Directory Enumeration Privilege & Membership Analysis Account Management Attacks Kerberos-Based Attacks User & Credential Manipulation DCSync Attack ACL Abuse…
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BloodyAD’s get children command lets us quickly map the domain structure by querying object types.
bloodyAD --host 192.168.1.11 -d ignite.local -u administrator -p 'Ignite@987' get children --otype computer CN=DC (Domain Controllers) the primary domain controller CN=MSEDGEWIN10, OU=Tech — a Windows 10 workstation in…
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dMSA Ouroboros: Self-Sustaining Credential Extraction in Windows Server 2025
Figure 14: silvio.dante has been deleted from Active Directory Figure 15: bloodyAD binds as silvio fails with SEC_E_LOGON_DENIED .
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Someone comfortable with BloodHound, Certipy, and bloodyAD could pull it off.
The same operations work from ldapsearch, SharpLDAP, bloodyAD, or raw LDAP from any Linux box on the network.
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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