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.
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.
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.
A while back a bug with the LVM encrypted install in Kali Linux 1.0.4 was reported in our bug tracker. This bug was high priority in our TODO as encrypted installs are an important feature in our industry, so we wanted to squash this bug asap. This article will describe the process of debugging, identifying and fixing this bug in Kali, and ultimately in Debian as well.
We’ve just pushed a bunch of packages, tools, and utilities to the main Kali repositories. These tools have been on the top of our wish list for a while and some of them were quite challenging to package. Before we start telling you of our packaging woes, here’s how to update your Kali installation and get the latest goodness from our repos:
