Category: Kali Linux
Kali Linux related news and updates from the Offensive Security Team
Creating Kali i3-gaps
i3 is a tiling window manager for Linux and BSD systems. In this blog post, Arszilla gives a walk through on how he created his custom Kali i3-gaps ISO.
Customizing Kali Linux
One of the designers on the Kali Linux team shares his top tips and tools to customize Kali Linux. Dig in under the hood with Daniel Ruiz de Alegría.
Kali Linux 2.1.2 ARM Releases
The time has come for yet another Kali ARM image release with new and updated images. Our collection of supported ARM hardware grows constantly with new images from Raspberry Pi 3, Banana Pi and Odroid-C2, with the latter being our first real arm64 image. We’re really excited about our new arm64 build environment and hope to see more 64bit ARM devices running Kali in the future. Feel free to visit our Kali Linux ARM downloads page to get the latest goodness.
Kali Rolling ISO of DOOM, Too.
A while back we introduced the idea of Kali Linux Customization by demonstrating the Kali Linux ISO of Doom. Our scenario covered the installation of a custom Kali configuration which contained select tools required for a remote vulnerability assessment. The customised Kali ISO would undergo an unattended autoinstall in a remote client site, and automatically connect back to our OpenVPN server over TCP port 443. The OpenVPN connection would then bridge the remote and local networks, allowing us full “layer 3” access to the internal network from our remote location. The resulting custom ISO could then be sent to the client who would just pop it into a virtual machine template, and the whole setup would happen automagically with no intervention – as depicted in the image below.
Kali Linux Rolling Virtual & ARM Images
With the recent release of Kali Rolling 2016.1 completed, we’ve gone ahead and updated our custom Kali VMware, VirtualBox, and ARM images. Here’s a few news items and updates that we have regarding these images for those who prefer to get them pre-built.
Kali Linux 2.0 Top 10 Post Install Tips
With Kali 2.0 now released, we wanted to share a few post install procedures we find ourselves repeating over and over, in the hopes that you will find them useful as well. We’ve also slapped in some answers to common questions we’ve been getting. Here is our top 10 list:
Kali 2.0 Dojo Black Hat / DEF CON USA 2015
Last years event was a rousing success, with many attendees staying all day long and working through the multiple exercises. We had such a great time, we wanted to do it again. This is a great chance to get hands on with Kali 2.0, learning the cutting edge features and how to best put them to use. In this two session workshop series, we will be covering how to create your own custom Kali ISO that is tweaked and modified to exactly fit your needs. This will be followed up in the second session with a hands-on exercise of deploying Kali on USB sticks so that it contains several persistent storage profiles, both regular and encrypted – including the LUKS nuke feature.
Booting Kali Linux Live Over HTTP
Kali Linux Features
Here at Offensive Security, we tend to use Kali Linux in unconventional ways – often making use of some really amazing features that Kali Linux has to offer. One of these interesting use-cases includes booting instances of Kali Linux Live over HTTP, directly to RAM. We realized there’s little documentation around this feature and thought we’d shed some light on it so others may enjoy this feature as well.
Booting Kali Over HTTP – Overview
The basic premise involves using the Kali Live kernel and initrd for booting,
Kali Linux on a Raspberry Pi (A/B+/2) with Disk Encryption
With the advent of smaller, faster ARM hardware such as the new Raspberry Pi 2 (which now has a Kali image built for it), we’ve been seeing more and more use of these small devices as “throw-away hackboxes“. While this might be a new and novel technology, there’s one major drawback to this concept – and that is the confidentiality of the data stored on the device itself. Most of the setups we’ve seen do little to protect the sensitive information saved on the SD cards of these little computers.
Kali USB – Multiple Persistent Stores
One of the markings of the 1.0.7 Kali release was the introduction of Kali Live USB LUKS encrypted persistent storage, on which we further elaborated in one of our previous blog posts. However, we’re not done yet with USB persistent storage as more features in Kali remain to be explored.
Bypassing Windows and OSX Logins with NetHunter & Kon-boot
The Kali Linux NetHunter platform has many hidden features which we still haven’t brought to light. One of them is the DriveDroid application and patch set, which have been implemented in NetHunter since v1.0.2. This tool allows us to have NetHunter emulate a bootable ISO or USB, using images of our choosing. That’s right, you can use NetHunter as a boot device which holds a library of bootable ISOs and images…And so we begin:
Kali with Raspberry Pi TFT support
Several weeks ago a request in the Kali forums prompted us to look at the integration of the Adafruit 2.8in TFT touch screen for Kali Linux. A few weeks and much less hair later, we are happy to announce the availability of this image in our Offensive Security custom Kali images section.
Kali Nexus NetHunter 1.0.2
It’s been a week since our release of the Kali Linux NetHunter, and the feedback is amazing. A NetHunter community has sprung up from nowhere, and the forums and github pages are really active. We’re completely stoked about this community response, and are eager to see it grow. After an intense week of community testing and a slew of bugfixes (including shellshock), we thought it would be a good opportunity to release a NetHunter update. Please welcome NetHunter 1.0.2 .
Kali Linux Evil Wireless Access Point
A few days ago, we had the opportunity to deploy a rogue access point that would steal user credentials using a fake, captive web portal, and provide MITM’d Internet services via 3G. We needed reliability and scalability in our environment as there would potentially be a large amount of, erm….”participants” in this wireless network. We were pretty happy with the result and quickly realized that we had created a new “Kali Linux recipe”. Or in other words, we could create a custom, bootable wireless evil access point image, which could do all sorts of wondrous things.
Announcing the Kali Linux Dojo
For the past 6 months, we’ve been busy silently developing an advanced Kali Linux course the likes of which has not yet been seen in the industry. This set of in-depth, practical workshops focuses on the Kali operating system itself, demonstrating some of its advanced features and use-cases by its developers. As with all “Offensive Security” training, this workshop is intensive, educational, and addictively engaging. If you’ve ever wished for fluent proficiency with Kali Linux, this workshop is for you.
Kali Encrypted USB Persistence
A couple of days ago, we added an awesome new feature to Kali allowing users to set up a Live Kali USB with encrypted persistence. What this means is that you can now set up a bootable Kali USB drive allowing you to either boot to a “clean” Kali image or alternatively, overlay it with the contents of a persistent encrypted partition, allowing you to securely save your changes on the USB drive between reboots. If you add our LUKS nuke feature into this mix together with a 32GB USB 3.0 thumb drive, you’ve got yourself a fast, versatile and secure “Penetration Testing Travel Kit”.
Offensive Security Introduces Kali Linux
Free All-in-One Solution for Professional Security Auditing
Popular BackTrack Linux Evolves Into Mature, Enterprise-Ready Penetration Testing Toolkit.
Black Hat Europe, Amsterdam – March 13 – Offensive Security today announced the availability of Kali Linux, the evolution of its popular BackTrack Linux, a free security auditing operating system and toolkit. Showcased at Black Hat Europe in Amsterdam, Kali Linux incorporates more than 300 penetration testing and security auditing programs with a Linux operating system, delivering an all-in-one solution that enables IT administrators and security professionals to test the effectiveness of risk mitigation strategies.
“For IT professionals, an experiment is worth a thousand theories. Applied to security, it means that simulating attacks to assess the defenses protecting your organization is the only sure way to understand their effectiveness and the impact of an attack,” said Mati Aharoni, Lead Trainer and Developer, Offensive Security. “That’s why we created Kali Linux; we’ve developed the most advanced penetration testing and security auditing toolkit available to help IT administrators and security professionals put themselves in the shoes of potential attackers.”
The new Kali Linux offers a smoother, easier penetration testing experience, making it more accessible to IT generalists as well as security specialists. The new infrastructure incorporates Debian development standards to provide a more familiar environment for IT administrators. The result is a more robust solution that can be updated more easily. Users can also customize the operating system to tailor it to their needs and preferences.
All the programs packaged with the operating system were evaluated for suitability and effectiveness before being included. They include Metasploit for network penetration testing, Nmap for port and vulnerability scanning, Wireshark for monitoring network traffic, and Aircrack-ng for testing the security of wireless networks.
“When it comes to security, the best defense is offense; you need to test the effectiveness of your own security practices before a real intruder does it for you,” said HD Moore, Chief Architect for Metasploit at Rapid7. “We built Metasploit to level the playing field for defenders; arming them with the same tools the attackers have. Offensive Security takes this even further, bringing hundreds of such tools together in Kali Linux to streamline security auditing.”
Additionally, Kali Linux can now run on a wide variety of hardware and is compatible with numerous wireless and USB devices. It also introduced support for ARM devices – typically miniature, battery-powered computers – which are becoming more prevalent and inexpensive. More information on which devices are supported, as well as other documentation, is available on the Kali Linux documentation site.