# hellman/xortool

A tool to analyze multi-byte xor cipher

Repository: https://github.com/hellman/xortool
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/xortool
Language: Python
License Family: other
Topics: xortool, xor-cipher, cryptography, cryptanalysis
Last push: 2025-05-21T12:05:24+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 42/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 22, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 5706, "days_push": 469, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1488, forks 180 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:52.112845+00:00)

## What it is
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
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: active
- function: cryptography, security, cli, developer-tools
- domain: security, developer-tools
- platform: python, cli, windows, cross-platform
- tags: xor-cipher, cryptanalysis, ctf-tools, key-length-guessing, known-plaintext-attack, cryptography, command-line, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- hellman/xortool (main) score 42

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:52.112845+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T04:33:44.350725+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/hellman/xortool (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:52.112845+00:00, sha 024aa7c04adc)
  - registry_pypi: https://pypi.org/pypi/xortool/json (fetched 2026-08-29T11:39:43.351273+00:00, sha 7196b85f275e)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.