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.
Utilite Pro is a quad core ARM cortex-A9 machine with up to 4 GB of RAM, up to 512 GB mSATA SSD, HDMI and DVI-D output, dual (2x) 1GB nics, a built in wireless card and 4 USB ports. And its fanless. With those type of specs, this little beauty was unlikely to skip our radars. We wanted Kali Linux on that baby, real bad.
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, including our fix for the encrypted encrypted LVM installation issue that we documented last week. As usual, users with Kali already installed just need to run a simple update to get the latest goodness:
Kali Linux on any Android Phone or Tablet 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 little 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.
Whenever we are given the opportunity to describe Kali Linux, we use the word “powerful”. Have you ever wondered or asked yourself why exactly we consider Kali to be so “Powerful”? Why is Kali any different or better from say, an Ubuntu machine with a bunch of security tools preinstalled on it? After all, our nmap package isn’t any better than anyone else’s, is it?
In keeping with our tradition of publishing new releases during the annual Black Hat and DEF CON conferences, we are pleased to announce the availability of Kali Linux 1.0.4. The last few months since the initial release of Kali have seen a large number of changes, upgrades, and improvements in the distribution, all of which are included in version 1.0.4.
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:
A couple of weeks ago, we were approached (independently) by two blind security enthusiasts who both drew our attention to the fact that Kali Linux had no built-in accessibility features. This made Kali difficult, if not impossible, to both install and use from a blind or visually impaired user’s perspective.
We’ve been busy this week, still behind on our emails, but going strong with Kali development. We packaged some new tools which were pointed out by the community as missing, such as inguma, arachni, bully, lbd, uniscan, automater, as well as started to build a framework of libraries and patches for bluetooth sniffing and ubertooth tools. We also fixed the Kali Menu to be editable again.
Five days into the Kali Linux release at BlackHat EU in Amsterdam, and we’re still not fully recovered. Since the release, we’ve had just over 90,000 downloads, a dozen or so package updates, added more articles to the Kali Documentation, started a Portuguese translation, and we even managed to squeeze in a small bugfix release (Kali 1.0.1), which resolved an annoying USB keyboard issue some users reported. The responses to Kali so far have been extremely positive and our bug tracker is surely enough filling up with new tool requests. We encourage Open-source tool developers to contact us so that we can work together towards this goal.
