The BeagleBone Black is a low-cost, community-supported ARM-based development platform aimed at developers and hobbyists. The BeagleBone Black runs a 1GHz Cortex-A8 CPU and includes hardware-based floating point and 3D acceleration; while much lower-powered than a desktop or laptop system, its affordability makes it an excellent option for a tiny Linux system.

The BeagleBone Black provides a microSD card slot for mass storage and if that device is bootable, will use it in preference to the board’s “burned-in” Angstrom or Debian operating system.

By default, the Kali Linux BeagleBone Black image contains the kali-linux-default metapackage similar to most other platforms. If you wish to install extra tools please refer to our metapackages page.

Kali does not provide pre-built images for download, but you can still generate one by cloning the Kali-ARM Build-Scripts repository on GitLab, and follow the README.md file’s instructions. The script to use is beaglebone-black.sh.

Once the build script finishes running, you will have an “img.xz” file in the images directory where you ran the script from. At that point, the instructions are the same as if you had downloaded a pre-built image.

The easiest way to generate these images is from within a pre-existing Kali Linux environment.

To install Kali on your Beaglebone Black, follow these instructions:

1. Get a fast microSD card with at least 16GB capacity. Class 10 cards are highly recommended.
2. Use the dd utility to image this file to your microSD card (same process as making a Kali USB.

In our example, we assume the storage device is located at /dev/sdX. Do not simply copy these value, change this to the correct drive path.

$ xzcat images/kali-linux-2024.1-beaglebone-black-armhf.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progres

This process can take a while, depending on your PC, your microSD card speed, and the size of the Kali Linux image.

Once the dd operation is complete, boot up the Beaglebone with the microSD card plugged in.

You should be able to log in to Kali.