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GhostESP-Revival/GhostESP
An open source platform for ESP32 devices.
GhostESP-Revival is an ESP-IDF-native firmware for ESP32 devices focused on wireless security research and pentesting — WiFi deauth, beacon spam, handshake capture, BLE scanning, NFC attacks, SubGHz replay, BadUSB, and wardriving, all on a $5-20 microcontroller. It's a community-maintained fork of the original GhostESP after the original author archived it. The target audience is security researchers and hobbyists who want a Flipper Zero-adjacent tool without the Flipper price tag.
Built on ESP-IDF rather than Arduino/PlatformIO, which gives you proper FreeRTOS task management, better memory control, and access to the full Espressif SDK without the abstraction tax. The board support list is genuinely wide — 30+ targets including M5 Cardputer, LilyGo T-Deck, and a bunch of CYD variants — and the build system uses a Python script rather than hand-editing CMake per board. Live Wireshark streaming over USB (extcap mode) is a real differentiator; most alternatives make you pull a PCAP file from SD after the fact. The feature comparison table in the README is honest and auditable — they call out where competitors have closed-source newer releases rather than just claiming superiority.
211k LOC of embedded C with minimal documentation on the internals makes contributing or extending anything non-trivial; there's no architectural overview, just a README full of feature lists. The project is a detached fork with community maintainers, which means the bus factor is unclear — if the current active contributors move on, this stalls again like the original did. Feature availability 'may vary by model' with no matrix showing which features work on which chip variant, so you won't know if your C3 board supports BLE spam until you flash it. No unit or integration tests visible anywhere in the tree, which for security tooling means regressions in capture/replay accuracy are caught only by users in the field.