portspoof
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Portspoof emulates open ports and service signatures across all 65535 TCPTCPA network protocol that delivers a reliable, ordered stream of bytes between two endpoints. It detects lost data and retransmits it. ports, turning reconnaissance from a quick scan into a long, resource-intensive process.
Summary
Portspoof is an open-source (GPLv3) honeypot daemon that makes all 65535 TCP ports appear open, answering probes with thousands of fake service signatures so a full Nmap scan turns into a long, unreliable exercise instead of a quick map of real services. It runs as a lightweight userland process on Linux/POSIXPOSIXA family of standards for operating-system interfaces, including process, file and shell behavior. Software that uses these interfaces is easier to move between compatible systems. systems, binding one port per instance, and its tarpit engine holds connections open after sending a banner to tie up scanner resources further, with delivery modes (immediate, delayed, silent) randomized to resist timing fingerprinting. First committed in 2012 with 15 contributors, it sees only light activity now, three commits in the past year and a release roughly six months ago.
Portspoof emulates open ports and service signatures across all 65535 TCP ports, turning reconnaissance from a quick scan into a long, resource-intensive process.
How portspoof helps
What would a full version-detection scan of my network actually show an attacker?
every one of the 65535 ports answers with a distinct fake service signature drawn from a pool of over 9000, so the scan returns thousands of plausible but bogus identifications instead of the real handful of listening services
Which of my exposed ports are attackers actually probing?
closed and filtered ports instead answer SYN+ACK and hand back a fake banner, so any connection attempt against them is a probe worth logging rather than a scan bouncing off nothing
How long will reconnaissance against this host actually take a scanner?
connections are held open after the banner is sent, and each port's delivery mode (immediate, delayed, or silent) is picked randomly with jittered hold times, so a full scan runs long and its timing can't be used to fingerprint the defense
Can I tell whether last week's scan was hitting real services or decoys?
ports can be run in a mode that opens without emitting any service banner at all, so probes against those ports are unambiguously reconnaissance rather than a match against a real signature
Is my exposure the same every time someone scans this host?
each port's behavioral profile is assigned at startup and delivery timing is spread across a logarithmic distribution with per-connection jitter, so repeated scans don't converge on a stable, fingerprintable pattern
Are my own scanning tools safe to point at hosts I don't control?
fuzzing modes send random payloads or wordlist-driven input back at connecting clients, so a scanner probing a protected host can itself be exercised against malformed responses
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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 portspoof, 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 portspoof 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.
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Releases
1 entry
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- February 20261
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in drk1wi/portspoof, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 2 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +1 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed not measured of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 390 days issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 0 of 40 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 0
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 2,420
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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