Kali Linux 2023.4 for Raspberry Pi 5 If you have been lucky enough to get your hands on the newest Raspberry Pi, Kali Linux can now be used on a Raspberry Pi 5! We have created a new dedicated image which can either be downloaded direct, or automated using Raspberry Pi Imager. You can build the image yourself if you wish to tinker and customize any aspect of it, such as changing the default desktop environment, packages, settings etc. Please note, Nexmon support is not yet working with the in-built Wi-Fi (so no monitor mode or frame injection without an external card). You can keep an eye on progress by checking our documentation about it. Please keep in mind that while the image is now available for use, we would consider it to be in a BETA state. For the time being, the image is for ARM64 architecture, hopefully additional flavors will come later. We want to give a huge shout-out as there were a lot of volunteers from the community who were willing to test and report issues with the image. There was one person who really stood out, and this image would not be possible without BakaValen’s assistance, support, reporting of issues, and ideas. Additionally, David Bombal’s Raspberry Pi 5 Kali Linux install in 10 minutes came out to show off our initial work of Kali Linux on the Raspberry Pi 5. GNOME 45 With GNOME 45 hot off the press, Kali Linux is now supporting it! And is looking pretty in the process! Kali GNOME 45 For people who opt to use GNOME as their desktop environment, GNOME 45 is now here! If you do not read their changelog, below is a quick summary mixed with some of our tweaks: Full-height sidebars in many updated apps Highly improved speed of search in nautilus file manager Unfortunately the update for nautilus was not ready for this release, but it will arrive as a later update soon Improved settings app (gnome-control-center) Updated color-schemes for gnome-text-editor Updated themes for shell, libadwaita, gtk-3 and gtk-4 Updated gnome-shell extensions Shell updates, including a new workspace indicator, replacing the previous “Activities” button It is also possible to scroll your mouse wheel while hovering over the indicator to switch between workspaces GNOME 45 activities indicator Internal Infrastructure We are still undergoing big changes with our infrastructure, and as always, it is taking longer than planned! The wait has been worth it, and long standing items are getting fixed or replaced! Enters Mirrorbits One of the projects which is now complete is the migration of our “mirror redirector”. This is our biggest user-facing service, as without this, all default Kali installations would not be able to use apt (aka http.kali.org), or being able to download Kali image (cdimage.kali.org). This service sits in-front of our mirrors (archive*.kali.org), community mirrors and Cloudflare (kali.download). It is responsible for redirecting every request to its nearest mirror, based on a few factors such as geographic location, mirror speed, and mirror “freshness”. Since Kali was launched back in March 2013, until November 2023 we had been using MirrorBrain. Unfortunately, the project has been unmaintained since 2015, and so after 10 years in production, it was really time to say good-bye. Today, we are now using Mirrorbits. The first thing we can say is that, with Mirrorbits, we find ourselves lucky: this is a rock-solid piece of software, built on modern tech (Go and Redis), initially released 10 years ago, and running in production for just as long. It was initially developed by Ludovic Fauvet from VideoLAN in order to distribute the VLC media player. And over these years, it has been adopted by a growing number of FOSS projects such as GNOME, Jenkins, Lineage OS, and many others. As it happens, our use-case of Mirrorbits is different to what it was originally created for: distributing VLC, or in other words, a rather small set of static files. Kali Linux being a complete Linux distribution, it means that we distribute a huge number of files (at times there can be millions of files in our repo). Being a rolling distribution means that Mirrorbits must cope with fast-changing metadata in the repository. We also need to distribute Kali over both HTTP and HTTPS, which was not well supported. Thus, the transition to Mirrorbits was not trivial, it did not work “out-of-the-box” for us, and we had to rework some pieces here and there, and basically hammer at it until it does the job. But it was well worth it, and in the end our modifications were clean enough that we could submit it all upstream. We really hope that all of this work will be accepted, thus making it easier for Linux distributions in general to use Mirrorbits going forward. Oh, and we have created and are maintaining the Debian package! Much more could be written on the topic, and we plan a longer blog post dedicated to it. But for now, enough’s been said. New Tools in Kali It would not be a Kali release if there were not any new tools added! A quick run down of what has been added (to the network repositories): cabby - TAXII client implementation cti-taxii-client - TAXII 2 client library enum4linux-ng - Next generation version of enum4linux with additional features (a Windows/Samba enumeration tool) exiflooter - Finds geolocation on all image URLs and directories h8mail - Email OSINT & Password breach hunting tool Havoc - Modern and malleable post-exploitation command and control framework OpenTAXII - TAXII server implementation PassDetective - Scans shell command history to detect mistakenly written passwords, API keys, and secrets Portspoof - All 65535 TCP ports are always open & emulates services Raven - Lightweight HTTP file upload service ReconSpider - Most Advanced Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Framework rling - RLI Next Gen (Rling), a faster multi-threaded, feature rich alternative to rli Sigma-Cli - List and convert Sigma rules into query languages sn0int - Semi-automatic OSINT framework and package manager SPIRE - SPIFFE Runtime Environment is a toolchain of APIs for establishing trust between software systems There have also been numerous packages updates and new libraries as well. We also bump the Kali kernel to 6.5.0! Community Packages There have been multiple tools submitted from the community, ready to be merged into Kali: h8mail - Credit to: Jason “5nacks” Kregting & TraceLabs PassDetective - Credit to: Yunus “aydinnyunus” AYDIN sn0int - Credit to: kpcyrd For more information about this, please see our blog post from previous release.