bully
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Bully is a C program that brute-forces WPS on Wi-Fi access points by exploiting the WPS specification design flaw, running on Linux including embedded systems.
Summary
bully is an open-source command-line tool that carries out the WPS brute-force attack against Wi-Fi access points, exploiting the known design flaw in the WPS specification to recover credentials. It is run from a monitor-mode wireless interface on Linux, targeting an access point by BSSID or ESSID, and it was written specifically to run on embedded Linux systems such as OpenWrt as well as standard distributions. Its README frames it as a successor to the original reaver code, with fewer dependencies, better memory and CPUCPUThe main general-purpose processor in a computer. It runs application instructions and coordinates work with memory and other hardware. handling, and correct endianness support, which places it in the same wireless-auditing niche as reaver for penetration testers and wireless security researchers assessing WPS-enabled networks. Development is not very active: it dates back to 2013 with four contributors, and has seen only one commit and one release in the past year.
Bully is a C program that brute-forces WPS on Wi-Fi access points by exploiting the WPS specification design flaw, running on Linux including embedded systems.
How bully helps
Which access points nearby are still exposing WPS and worth targeting?
takes a BSSID or ESSID from a monitor-mode interface and works the WPS exchange with that single access point, so the reader learns whether that specific target answers to the protocol at all
Can this access point's WPS PIN be recovered without crashing the session halfway through?
drives the brute-force sequence itself, tracking session state and randomized pin progress in ordinary files so a run can be resumed rather than restarted after a drop
Is a given access point vulnerable to the same WPS flaw regardless of vendor quirks?
has been exercised against access points from multiple vendors and configurations, and adjusts its handling of anomalous responses so oddities in one implementation don't stall the attack
Will a weak wireless test rig hold up over a long brute-force run?
is built with reduced memory and CPU overhead compared to the original reaver code, which matters when it's run on constrained embedded Linux hardware like an OpenWrt router doing the assessment
Can this recovered PIN be trusted on hardware with a different byte order than the machine that built the tool?
handles endianness correctly internally, so a PIN or key recovered on one architecture reads correctly rather than coming out scrambled
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
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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 bully, 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 bully 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 kimocoder/bully, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 1 +1 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed not measured of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 2 of 5 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 2
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 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
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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