penelope
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Shell handler for penetration testers that provides automatic PTY upgrades, session management, logging, file transfers, and modules for post-exploitation.
penelope --max-sessions 3 -p 4444 penelope -p 4444 --max-sessions 3 penelope -p 4444 --max-sessions 0 download <remote/path/<TAB> penelope -l 4444 4445 4446
Summary
Penelope is an open-source shell handler for managing reverse shells during penetration tests and CTFs, released under an open license and run as a command-line tool on Unix-like systems, either as a standalone Python script, via pipx, or through the Kali Linux package repositories. It targets penetration testers and CTFCTFCapture The Flag — a competitive hacking challenge format where participants exploit intentionally vulnerable systems or puzzles to retrieve hidden strings, used by cyber tools to practice and demonstrate offensive and defensive techniques. players rather than defenders, and its README frames it as a more capable alternative to basic netcat listeners, adding automatic PTY upgrades, session logging, file transfer and a set of post-exploitation modules covering 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., Active DirectoryActive DirectoryMicrosoft's directory service for Windows networks that centralises authentication and authorisation; cyber tools target or integrate with it because it controls identity and access across most enterprise environments. enumeration and tunneling through tools like Ligolo-ng and Chisel. First committed in 2021, it has 20 contributors and remains actively maintained, with 198 commits and 17 releases in the past year, the most recent 65 days ago.
Shell handler for penetration testers that provides automatic PTY upgrades, session management, logging, file transfers, and modules for post-exploitation.
How penelope helps
Which shells are still holding a connection, and which ones dropped without me noticing?
tracks every session per host and displays live status in the main menu, so dead or hung connections are visible instead of silently occupying a slot
How do I pull a whole directory off a compromised host without hand-crafting a transfer?
offers built-in download and upload of files and folders over the existing shell, with progress bars and remote path autocompletion so files don't have to be moved one at a time
What did the target actually type, and what came back, during a session that ended hours ago?
logs shell activity as it happens, giving a record to review after the session closes rather than relying on scrollback
Can I get a usable interactive shell without wrestling the target into a PTY by hand?
auto-upgrades incoming connections to a full PTY on Unix-like targets, or to readline on Windows, as soon as they land
How do I move privilege-escalation and AD enumeration tools onto a box without re-uploading them by hand each time?
bundles modules such as privesc checks, adPEAS, and known collection tools that can be pushed to a session directly from the handler
How do I get traffic from my machine into a network I only have a shell on?
includes Ligolo-ng and Chisel tunneling modules that set up pivoting directly from an active session, without switching to a separate tool
Languages
Command line
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Screenshots
From the release notes, newest first. Click one to see it full size.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 penelope, 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 penelope 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
13 entries
No entries match these filters.
- June 20263
- May 20261
- March 20261
- January 20261
- December 20252
- September 20251
- October 20231
- December 20221
- January 20222
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in brightio/penelope, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 13 +8 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 97% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 3.2 days first maintainer reply 10 hours
- Open backlog 3 of 85 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 3
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 2,077
- bugs 22%
- features 56%
- questions 3%
- other 19%
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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