Kali Linux

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.

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.

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.

A couple of weeks ago, we had the opportunity to scan and map a large IP address space covering just over 3 million hosts. Our tool of choice for this was the fast and capable masscan, which is packaged in Kali. While masscan has several convenient output formats, such as binary and XML, one feature we were missing was an easy way to search our results. We quickly whipped up a little web interface that would allow us to import and search within a masscan XML output file. This feature proved very useful for us – as once we identified a specific vulnerable pattern on a machine, we could easily cross reference this pattern with over the millions of discovered hosts in our database.

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.