hellman/xortool

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1488 stars · 180 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

xortool is a Python command-line tool for cryptanalysis of multi-byte XOR ciphers. It guesses the key length based on character frequency statistics and recovers the key using knowledge of the most frequent plaintext character or known plaintext.

Use cases

• crack multi-byte xor encrypted files
• guess xor key length from ciphertext
• recover xor key using known plaintext
• solve ctf xor challenges
• analyze hex-encoded xor ciphertext
• brute force most frequent character in xor cipher

When to choose

• you need to break repeating-key xor encryption in a CTF or analysis task
• you have ciphertext with a known or guessable frequent character
• you want a quick pip-installable xor analysis tool

When to avoid

• you need modern authenticated encryption or general crypto library functionality
• you need cryptanalysis of ciphers other than xor
• you require a maintained library with an explicit license file

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

cryptography security cli developer-tools security developer-tools python cli windows cross-platform xor-cipher cryptanalysis ctf-tools key-length-guessing known-plaintext-attack cryptography command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="hellman/xortool")