polenum
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Uses Core's Impacket Library to get the password policy from a windows machine - Wh1t3Fox/polenum
Summary
polenum is an open-source command-line tool that retrieves the password policy from a Windows machine using Core's Impacket DCERPC library, and it is free to use. You run it against a target with credentials and an IP address, in the style of enum4linux, making it a fit for penetration testers and red teamers doing SMBSMBA network file-sharing protocol developed by Microsoft that lets systems share files, printers, and named pipes over a network; cyber tools target or speak it because it is ubiquitous in Windows environments. enumeration during the recon phase of an engagement rather than for ongoing monitoring. It is a fork of the original polenum from Portcullis Labs, updated to work with the current Impacket library rather than a standalone rewrite. The project traces back to 2016 with 8 contributors, but there have been no commits in the past year and the last release was well over a year ago, so it should be treated as dormant rather than actively maintained.
Uses Core's Impacket Library to get the password policy from a windows machine - Wh1t3Fox/polenum
How polenum helps
What is the password lockout threshold on this target, and will my brute-force attempts trip it?
connects over DCERPC with a set of credentials and reads back the account lockout threshold, lockout duration, and observation window straight from the domain policy, so a tester knows how many guesses are safe before an account locks
What is the minimum password length and complexity requirement enforced on this domain?
pulls the policy fields covering minimum length, complexity, and history straight from the target machine, giving a tester the real constraints to check candidate passwords against instead of guessing at defaults
How old are the passwords allowed to get before this domain forces a change?
reads the maximum and minimum password age fields from the retrieved policy, showing how stale credentials could be and whether a stolen hash is likely still valid
Can I get this target's password policy with nothing more than a set of credentials and an address?
takes a username, password, and IP address in the same style as enum4linux and returns the policy over DCERPC without needing any other access to the box
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 polenum, 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 polenum 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 Wh1t3Fox/polenum, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 0 −2 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 0 of 6 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 0
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 44
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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