PAGES
← all tools
◆ Wireless & RF

wpa-sycophant

open-source

wpa_sycophant is a tool that relays phase 2 authentication attempts to access corporate wireless without cracking the password.

Summary

wpa-sycophant is an open-source command-line tool, free to use, that relays phase 2 PEAP/MSCHAPv2 authentication attempts to gain access to corporate wireless networks without cracking the captured password. It runs as a modified wpa_supplicant binary driven by a shell script, taking a config file and network interface as arguments, and it is meant to be paired with a rogue access point running hostapd-mana's enable_sycophant flag, which captures the first part of the challenge response for it to relay. This is a tool for wireless penetration testers running MSCHAP relay attacks rather than for defenders, and its README frames it as one half of an attack chain alongside hostapd-mana. First committed in 2018 with three contributors, it has seen no commits in the past year, so treat it as a historical reference implementation rather than an actively maintained tool.

wpa_sycophant is a tool that relays phase 2 authentication attempts to access corporate wireless without cracking the password.

How wpa-sycophant helps

Can I get onto a corporate wireless network without ever cracking the captured password?

relays the intercepted phase 2 MSCHAPv2 exchange live against the target network, so the authentication succeeds using the victim's credential in real time instead of a recovered password

Which corporate SSID am I actually able to authenticate against right now?

reads the SSID and blacklist settings from the config file, forcing the phase 1 and phase 2 parameters needed to relay against that specific network's PEAP setup

Will my rogue access point end up authenticating against itself instead of the real target?

takes a blacklisted BSSID in the config so the relay refuses to connect back to the rogue AP's own radio

How do I get the victim's challenge response into the relay without building my own capture path?

pairs with a rogue access point running a companion flag that writes down the first part of the challenge response, which it then picks up to start the handshake

Languages

Not documented

Release-note detail over time

See how much detail wpa-sycophant 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…

Explore the full chart →

Releases

Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.

last release Jul 5, 2023 · watching since Jun 24, 2026

Project health

Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in sensepost/wpa_sycophant, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.

  1. Contributors 0 ±0 vs prior 12 months
  2. Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
  3. Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
  4. Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
  5. Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
  6. Open backlog 2 of 6 issues ever filed
  1. Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
  2. Open backlog 2
  3. Contributors / month 0
  4. Commits / month 0
  5. Stars 221
Issue themes, last 12 months
  • 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.

Add the badge to your README

Maintain this project? The badge links readers straight to this page, so they can follow every release here.

Tracked by Cyber Toolchain Choose a badge style and copy the code →
browse all tools → score card for your toolchain →