Another edition of Hacker Summer Camp has come and gone. We had a great time meeting our users, new and old, particularly at our Black Hat Dojo, which was led by our great friend @ihackstuff and the rest of the Offensive Security crew. Now that everyone is back home, it’s time for our third Kali release of 2018, which is available for immediate download.
We use live-build to create our official Kali releases and we encourage users to jump in and build their own customized versions of Kali whenever we can. Our documentation of the process is one of the most popular items on our documentation site, and the Kali Dojo also revolves around this topic. We love it and our users love it.
One roadblock of live-build has always been the fact that you need a Kali system to build a Kali system. The reason for this is that small changes in both the original deboostrap and live-build packages are needed for building a Kali ISO. In Kali, these changes are already included, however in most Debian derivatives, some gentle massaging is needed to get our ISOs to build.
We have covered how to create secure “throw-away hack boxes” using the Raspberry Pi before, but we thought it was time to go back and take a look at the process again. With all the new Raspberry Pi models and Kali changes from when we last covered this, we found the old process was in need of some updating.
You may already be aware that you can safely add external repositories to your Kali Linux installation but you may not be aware that one of the many repositories available online includes one from Microsoft that includes PowerShell. The repository is for Debian but its packages install perfectly well on Kali, as we will show in this post.
This Kali release is the first to include the Linux 4.15 kernel, which includes the x86 and x64 fixes for the much-hyped Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. It also includes much better support for AMD GPUs and support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization, which allows for encrypting virtual machine memory such that even the hypervisor can’t access it.
In an earlier post, we covered Package Management in Kali Linux. With the ease of installation that APT provides, we have the choice amongst tens of thousands of packages but the downside is, we have tens of thousands of packages. Finding out what packages are available and finding the one(s) we want can be a daunting task, particularly for newcomers to Linux. In this post, we will cover three utilities that can be used to search through the haystack and help you take advantage of the vast open source ecosystem.
