Pacu
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Pacu is an open-source AWS exploitation framework designed for offensive security testing against cloud environments using plug-in modules.
history run akid -i "AKIA…" pacu run ebs__enum_snapshots_unauth python3 pacu.py --module cognito pacu > run route53__enum pacu --module organizations__assume_role
Summary
Pacu is an open-source AWS exploitation framework, free to use, that lets testers exploit configuration flaws in a cloud environment once they have a foothold. It runs as a command-line shell, installed via pip or pipx or launched from a published Docker image, and it works against live AWS accounts using modules rather than a fixed feature set, covering things like IAMIAMIdentity and Access Management — a framework of policies and services for controlling who can authenticate to systems and what resources they are authorized to use, letting cyber tools enforce least-privilege and audit access. 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., backdooring users, attacking Lambda functions, and enumerating services such as EKSEKSAmazon's managed Kubernetes service, run by AWS, that handles control-plane provisioning so teams can deploy containerized workloads without operating the underlying cluster infrastructure themselves., Elastic Beanstalk, and Directory Services. It is built for penetration testers doing offensive work against cloud environments rather than defenders monitoring them, and it sits in the cloud-security exploitation space alongside other AWS-focused attack tooling, maintained by Rhino Security Labs. With 87 contributors since its 2018 first commit and 34 commits and 14 releases in the past year, the project is under active development.
Pacu is an open-source AWS exploitation framework designed for offensive security testing against cloud environments using plug-in modules.
How Pacu helps
What can this AWS account's current credentials actually be escalated into?
walks the IAM permissions attached to the foothold through known privilege-escalation paths and reports which ones let it reach a higher-privileged role or user
Which IAM users or roles have a backdoor planted that would survive a password reset?
runs the backdooring modules against chosen identities and reports the access keys or trust relationships it added, so the same actions can be checked for or undone
What secrets are sitting exposed across this account's services?
enumerates likely secret locations and lists everything it finds after the scan completes, rather than stopping at the first hit
Which EKS pods would hand over a usable service account token?
queries running pods in the cluster and extracts the tokens it can reach, showing which ones grant further access
What does this account expose through Directory Services, Elastic Beanstalk, or domain trusts that wasn't on my radar?
runs the enumeration modules for each service and lists the environments, settings, shared directories, and trust relationships it finds, building out the picture of the account beyond IAM
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 Pacu, 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 Pacu 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
8 entries
No entries match these filters.
- July 20251
- May 20241
- January 20241
- October 20232
- August 20231
- June 20231
- April 20231
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in RhinoSecurityLabs/pacu, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 6 −1 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 2 +2 joined · −3 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 203 days first maintainer reply 12 days
- Open backlog 22 of 148 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 22
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 5,336
- 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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