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bruteforce-wallet

1.5.0 open-source

bruteforce-wallet tries to find the password of an encrypted Peercoin, Bitcoin, or Litecoin wallet.dat file via exhaustive or dictionary attack.

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Summary

bruteforce-wallet is an open-source command-line tool that tries dictionary or pattern-based passwords against encrypted cryptocurrency wallet files until it finds the one that opens them, at no cost to use. It supports wallets from Bitcoin Core and similar wallet.dat-style formats, and it lets you specify a character range, load candidate passwords from a file, and save or resume progress mid-run, which matters given how long a full search can take. It is aimed at people recovering access to their own locked wallets, or at password-recovery and forensics practitioners doing the same work for clients, rather than at penetration testers probing someone else's systems. It sits in the same niche as other offline password-cracking utilities but is narrowly built for wallet file formats rather than general hashes. Development has been quiet, with five contributors, a first commit back in 2014, and no commits in the past year, so treat it as stable but not actively maintained.

bruteforce-wallet tries to find the password of an encrypted Peercoin, Bitcoin, or Litecoin wallet.dat file via exhaustive or dictionary attack.

How bruteforce-wallet helps

What is the actual password protecting a locked wallet file?

tests candidate passwords from a dictionary file or a generated character range against the wallet's encryption until one successfully decrypts it, reporting the match once found

How far along is a search that has been running for hours?

reports the current bruteforcing speed and the last password tried, either continuously or on demand, so progress can be judged without stopping the run

Can an interrupted recovery attempt pick up where it left off?

saves its position to a file during the run and restores from that file on a later invocation, avoiding a restart from the beginning of the password space

Is testing every combination in a range going to take days or minutes?

reports the tried passwords per second while running, letting the practitioner estimate remaining time against the size of the chosen character range or dictionary

Will a wallet file from an older Bitcoin Core version even be tried correctly?

targets wallet.dat-style encrypted formats specifically, working against the same encryption structure those wallets use rather than a generic hash

Does a password containing accented or non-English characters get tried at all?

works through the full character set of the configured locale, including multi-byte encodings such as UTF-8, rather than restricting candidates to plain ASCII

Languages

Not documented

Score card

  1. Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
  2. Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
  3. Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
  4. Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
  5. Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
  6. Community health
  7. Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
  8. Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
  9. Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
  10. Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply

Nine scores for bruteforce-wallet, 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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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 bruteforce-wallet 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.

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Releases

1 entry

  1. July 20171

    1 entry

    1. 1.5.0 Jul 19, 2017 · release notes

      Version 1.5.0 adds state save/restore, configurable progress output, and live speed metrics.

      └──▷ GET THIS VERSION 
      $ git clone --branch 1.5.0 https://github.com/glv2/bruteforce-wallet.git
# already have the repo? check out this version:
$ git checkout 1.5.0
      └──▷ USE IT
      Pause a long running brute force and resume it on another machine or after a reboot
      shell 
      bruteforce-wallet --restore-state state.json ... && bruteforce-wallet --save-state state.json ...
      Monitor brute force progress with detailed metrics every 10 seconds
      shell 
      bruteforce-wallet --progress-interval 10 ...
      • Add --save-state and --restore-state options to persist and resume bruteforcing sessions via file
      • Add --progress-interval option to print progress info regularly during execution
      • Show bruteforcing speed and last tried password in progress information

      3 details in Everything

    Project health

    Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in glv2/bruteforce-wallet, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.

    1. Contributors 0 ±0 vs prior 12 months
    2. Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
    3. Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
    4. Community-filed not measured of issues opened, last 12 months
    5. Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
    6. Open backlog 11 of 40 issues ever filed
    1. Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
    2. Open backlog 11
    3. Contributors / month 0
    4. Commits / month 0
    5. Stars 432
    Issue themes, last 12 months not measured

    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

    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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