cntlm
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Local proxy authenticating to corporate NTLM/NTLMv2NTLMv2A Windows authentication protocol that proves knowledge of a password through a challenge and response. Captured authentication exchanges can be abused in relay attacks when protections are absent. proxies, forwarding connections without exposing credentials.
Summary
cntlm is an open-source authentication proxy that sits between an application and a corporate NTLM/NTLMv2 proxy, handling the handshake so credentials never pass through the client application. It is GPL-licensed and free to use, and it runs self-hosted as a local daemon on the machine or gateway that needs outbound access, with packages available for most Linux distributions and a Windows installer. It suits system administrators and developers stuck behind corporate proxies who need tools like package managers, browsers, or scripts to authenticate without embeddingembeddingLists of numbers a model produces to represent the meaning of text, images or code, so similar items sit close together. They power semantic search and RAG. domain passwords in each one. It occupies the same niche as other NTLM-authenticating proxy tools, forwarding connections while keeping credentials off the wire. First committed in 2007 and still active, with 25 contributors and 31 commits in the past year, though releases are infrequent, with the last one 367 days ago.
Local proxy authenticating to corporate NTLM/NTLMv2 proxies, forwarding connections without exposing credentials.
How cntlm helps
Can my package manager reach the internet without me putting our domain password in its configuration file?
it takes the credentials once in its own configuration and performs the NTLM/NTLMv2 handshake itself, so the downstream tool only ever talks to a local proxy address and never sees or stores the password
Why do my scripts and command-line tools fail to authenticate through the corporate proxy when a browser works fine?
it stands in as a local proxy that speaks NTLM/NTLMv2 on the tool's behalf, so anything that can be pointed at a plain HTTP proxy gets through without needing its own NTLM support
Is my domain password sitting in plaintext in some tool's config file right now?
since every outbound connection is redirected through the local daemon instead, credentials live in one place on the machine rather than copied into each application's settings
Can several different applications on this machine share one authenticated path to the corporate proxy?
it runs once as a daemon and every application is pointed at that single local address, so one authenticated session serves package managers, browsers and scripts alike instead of each negotiating its own
Will this keep working on the gateway machine after I set it up, without me maintaining it much?
it runs as a persistent local daemon rather than a one-off script, so it keeps handling the handshake for as long as the process stays up
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Command line
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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 cntlm, 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 cntlm 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 versat/cntlm, 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 · −2 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 50% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 580 days first maintainer reply 2.5 days
- Open backlog 2 of 27 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 2
- Contributors / month 1
- Commits / month 1
- Stars 172
- 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
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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