Gallopsled/pwntools

CTF framework and exploit development library

PythonNo license Last commit 3 days ago pwntools.com

Updated 5 min ago

Open on GitHub

Last 24 hours: +2; stars
Last 7 days: +26; stars
Last 30 days: +88; stars
Total stars: 13,787
Forks: 1,866

Star history

Total stars at the end of each week, from GitHub’s daily star counts.

+26 stars this week, against ~17 in a usual week

Rank in its topics

Out of repos that gained at least 20 stars in the period

Rank of Gallopsled/pwntools in each topic for today, this week and this month
Topic	Today	This week	This month
Python topic	–	#1275of 1298	#1709of 1855

Health signals

Mixed signalsChecked Oct 17, 2026

Commit activity: Commits in 7 of the last 13 weeks 14 commits on the default branch in 90 days
Maintainers: 9 commit authors in 90 days Top author: 38% of the last 13 commits
Issue responsiveness: Too few issues to tell 2 issues opened by others in 90 days
Pull requests: 7 merged, 0 closed, 11 open Of 18 pull requests opened in 90 days
Releases: Last release: 12 months ago 0 releases in the last 12 months
Project hygiene: License, CI and security policy
OpenSSF Scorecard: 4.7 / 10 (opens in new tab) Scanned Oct 12, 2026

Signals are computed automatically from public GitHub data. They are not an endorsement or a security audit. How health is computed

README

README.md

pwntools - CTF toolkit

Pwntools is a CTF framework and exploit development library. Written in Python, it is designed for rapid prototyping and development, and intended to make exploit writing as simple as possible.

from pwn import *
context(arch = 'i386', os = 'linux')

r = remote('exploitme.example.com', 31337)
# EXPLOIT CODE GOES HERE
r.send(asm(shellcraft.sh()))
r.interactive()

Documentation

Our documentation is available at docs.pwntools.com

A series of tutorials is also available online

To get you started, we've provided some example solutions for past CTF challenges in our write-ups repository.

Installation

Pwntools is best supported on 64-bit Ubuntu LTS releases (22.04 and 24.04). Most functionality should work on any Posix-like distribution (Debian, Arch, FreeBSD, OSX, etc.).

Pwntools supports Python 3.10+ since version 5.0.0. Use Pwntools 4.x for older versions as well as Python 2.7. Most of the functionality of pwntools is self-contained and Python-only. You should be able to get running quickly with

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-dev git libssl-dev libffi-dev build-essential
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pwntools

However, some of the features (assembling/disassembling foreign architectures) require non-Python dependencies. For more information, see the complete installation instructions here.