There’s been a fair amount of discussion around the recently introduced LUKS nuke patch we added to the cryptsetup package in Kali Linux. We wanted to take this opportunity to better explain this feature, as well as demonstrate some useful approaches which are worthwhile getting to know.
It’s been a while since our last minor release which makes 1.0.6 a more significant update than usual. With a new 3.12 kernel, a LUKS nuke feature, new Kali ARM build scripts, and Kali AMAZON AMI and Google Compute image generation scripts, not to mention numerous tool additions and updates – this release is really heavily laden with goodness. For more information about what’s new in this release, check the Kali changelog.
A couple of days ago one of us had the idea of adding a “nuke” option to our Kali install. In other words, having a boot password that would destroy, rather than decrypt the data on our drive. A few Google searches later, we found an old cryptsetup patch by Juergen Pabel which does just that – adds a “nuke” password to cryptsetup, which when used, deletes all keyslots and makes the data on the drive inacessible. We ported this patch for a recent version of cryptsetup, and posted it on github.
We’re always on the lookout for and interesting ARM hardware for Kali Linux. Whether it’s a Galaxy Note or a USB stick sized SS808, we want to see Kali run on it. You can therefore imagine our excitement, when we first laid our eyes on the Utilite pro.
Today we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Kali Linux 1.0.5 with a rollup of various tool additions, fixes, and upgrades. In particular, Software Defined Radio (SDR) researchers will be especially pleased to know that we have made some significant tool additions in this growing field.
Getting Kali Linux to run on ARM hardware has been a major goal for us since day one. So far, we’ve built native images for the Samsung Chromebook, Odroid U2, Raspberry Pi, RK3306, Galaxy Note 10.1, CuBox, Efika MX, and BeagleBone Black to name a few. This however does not mean you cannot install Kali Linux in a chroot on almost any modern device that runs Android. In fact, the developers of Linux Deploy have made it extremely easy to get any number of Linux distributions installed in a chroot environment using a simple GUI builder.
