There is nothing wrong with having a “full toolbox,” but sometimes loading individual tools on the distro of your choice can be a hair-pulling experience. In less than an hour, you can have a running pen testing box with more tools than you will ever use. Kali has become a go-to distribution for hacking, and rightly so. Kali Linux is an open source project that is maintained and funded by Offensive Security, a provider of information security training and penetration testing services. If you’re just getting started in penetration testing, or are simply interested in the basics, this blog is for you.

I’m Bo, a penetration tester at CompliancePoint (and also a customer of Rapid7). Following the example from our Kali documentation site, our LUKS encrypted partition is located at /dev/sdb2.The following is a guest post from Rapid7 customer Bo Weaver. Of course, if you’re über paranoid, you can also enable the Kali LUKS nuke feature to this persistent storage.

We’ve updated our Kali Linux documentation site to include the instructions for setting up your own Kali Linux Live USB with encrypted persistence.įollowing these few simple commands, you can now secure your USB persistent data while traveling. New Default Kali Boot Optionsįrom Kali 1.0.7 onwards, everything needed for encrypted Live USB persistence to work is already available in our ISO release, including an altered boot menu which now also contains two persistent boot options:įor either of these persistence options to work, we first need to image the Kali ISO to the USB device and then prepare a persistence partition, which can now also be encrypted. If you add our LUKS nuke feature into this mix together with a 32GB USB 3.0 thumb drive, you’ve got yourself a fast, versatile, and secure “Penetration Testing Travel Kit”.

Security Operations for Beginners (SOC-100)Ī few days ago, we added an awesome new feature to Kali allowing users to set up a Live Kali USB with encrypted persistence. What this means is that you can now create a bootable Kali USB drive allowing you to either live boot to a “clean” Kali image or alternatively, overlay it with the contents of a persistent encrypted partition, allowing you to securely save your changes on the USB drive between reboots.Exploit Development Prerequisites (EXP-100).

Kali usb