crowbar
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Brute forcing tool for penetration tests supporting RDPRDPA Microsoft protocol that lets a user view and control a remote Windows desktop over a network, giving cyber tools a standard channel to audit, attack-simulate, or monitor Windows systems remotely., SSH private keys, VNC, and OpenVPN authentication.
Summary
crowbar is an open-source, free brute-forcing tool run from the command line during penetration tests, targeting RDP, SSH, VNC and OpenVPN. Unlike tools that brute force SSH with username-password pairs, crowbar can attack it using private keys, letting a tester reuse key material recovered elsewhere in an engagement against other SSH servers; the same command-line interface handles RDP (with NLA support), VNC key authentication, and OpenVPN configs. It is built for penetration testers and red teamers rather than defenders, and it sits in the password-cracking category alongside other protocol-specific brute-force utilities, distinguished by its key-based approach rather than pure credential lists. It dates to 2014, has had 10 contributors and three tracked releases, but shows no commits in the past year.
Brute forcing tool for penetration tests supporting RDP, SSH private keys, VNC, and OpenVPN authentication.
How crowbar helps
Which SSH servers in this range will accept a private key I recovered elsewhere in the engagement?
tries the supplied key against every host on the target range or subnet and reports which ones authenticate, rather than testing username/password pairs
Which hosts on this subnet are actually running RDP, SSH, VNC or OpenVPN before I burn time attacking them?
can run a port scan across the IP range first and only launches the brute-force attempt against hosts where the target port is open
Can I get into this RDP host using a credential I already have, given it enforces network-level authentication?
drives the RDP login attempt through a client with NLA support, so the check reflects what a real NLA-enforcing host requires
Which of these VNC hosts will accept a key I've already obtained?
loads a single key file or a whole folder of them and attempts VNC key authentication against the target, reporting which attempts succeed
Can this OpenVPN configuration and certificate actually establish a session?
takes the supplied configuration and certificate file and attempts to bring up the connection, showing whether the credentials in hand are enough
Which login attempts across a whole password list actually succeeded, and where do I find them afterward?
runs every password in the supplied list against the target and writes successful attempts to an output file, with full activity kept in a separate log
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 crowbar, 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 crowbar 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 galkan/crowbar, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 0 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 38 of 55 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 38
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 1,532
- 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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