Download kali linux virtual images
This guide is about virtualizing Kali Linux inside of VirtualBox, allowing you to have a Kali VM. This is a great way to use Kali, as it is completely separate from the host, allows you to interact with other VMs (as well as the host machine and other machines on the network), and allows you to revert to snapshots.
You may wish to follow our other guide if you are trying to install VirtualBox on Kali Linux (as a host).
The guide below is what we use to generate our pre-made Kali Linux VirtualBox images. You may alter this to your needs. We always generate the images using the latest version of VirtualBox.
You may need to enable virtualization in your BIOS/UEFI for (e.g. Intel VT-x/AMD-V)
Wizard
Upon starting up VirtualBox, select “New” (Machine -> New).
The next screen is “Name and operating system” which is where you name the VM. This name is also used in any filenames (such as the configuration, hard disk and snapshot — which isn’t changed from this point).
We are keeping it generic in this guide (as Kali is a rolling distribution, and we update it), however for our releases, we use the version number in the name as it is a fixed release ( kali-linux-YYYY.N-vbox-ARCH . Example: kali-linux-2021.3-vbox-amd64 ).
For the “Type”, we set it as Linux . For the “Version”, we are going to be using the x64 desktop image, so we are going to select Debian (64-bit) .
“Memory size” is the next section, where we can define how much RAM to use. Again, the higher the amount of RAM, the more applications can be open and at increased performance. Various tools inside of Kali can be demanding of resources. When we make the general VMs, we select 2048 MB (2GB) for RAM, but we often increase this for our personal machines as we have high-performing devices with spare RAM which Kali can utilize.
This screen below, “Hard disk”, allows us to Create a new virtual disk now .
For the “Hard disk file type”, we select VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) (and its the default option).
For the following screen, “Storage on physical hard disk”, we go with the default option of Dynamically allocated .
Now with “File location and size”, we can now define how large the virtual hard disk will be. We use 80.00 GB for our VMs.
After clicking on “Create”, the wizard is complete.
Now we click on “Settings”, to customize the VM further.
In “General” -> “Advanced”, we make sure to set “Shared Clipboard” to bidirectional , as well as “Drag’n’Drop” to bidirectional
In “System” -> “Motherboard”, we change the “Boot Order” to make sure Hard Disk is top and Optical is the second. Everything else is disabled.
In “System” -> “Processor”, we increase the “Processor(s)” to be 2 .
At the same time, we also enable “Extended Features” for Enable PAE/NX .
In “Display” -> “Screen”, we make sure to have “Video Memory” set to 128 MB
Another item to point out is to make sure that “Accelerated 3D graphics” is disabled, as people have reported that causes issues.
The final settings view looks like the following:
When we are ready to go, press “Start”.
The first time we run it, we will get a prompt saying do we wish to mount an image to use as a “start-up disk”. We want to use our Kali image, rather than a physical drive, so we select the icon to the side of the drop down.
A new pop up will open, “Optical Disk Selector”. We will now press “Add”, then navigate to where our ISO is located.
After pressing “Open”, we can see its been added, so we make sure its selected and press “Choose”.
All that is left now to do is press “Start”.
After all this is done, we save, start up the VM, and then continue installing Kali Linux as we normally would for a bare metal install.
During Kali Linux setup process, the install wizard should detect if its inside a VM. If it is, should then automatically install any additional tools (such as virtualbox-guest-x11 ) to give a better user experience. If you want to manually re-install it, you can see our VirtualBox Guest Guide.
Updated on: 2021-Sep-27
Author: g0tmi1k
Источник
Download kali linux virtual images
IMPORTANT! Never download Kali Linux images from anywhere other than the official sources.
Always be sure to verify the SHA256 checksums of the file you’ve downloaded against our official values.
It would be easy for a malicious entity to modify a Kali installation to contain exploits or malware and host it unofficially.
Where to Get Official Kali Linux Images
ISO Files for Intel-based PCs
In order to run Kali “Live” from a USB drive on standard Windows and Apple PCs, you’ll need a Kali Linux bootable ISO image, in either 32-bit or 64-bit format.
If you’re not sure of the architecture of the system you want to run Kali on, on Linux or macOS, you can run the command uname -m at the command line. If you get the response, “x86_64”, use the 64-bit ISO image (the one containing “amd64” in the file name); if you get “i386”, use the 32-bit image (the one containing “i386” in the file name). If you’re on a Windows system, the procedure for determining whether your architecture is detailed on Microsoft’s website.
The Kali Linux images are available both as directly downloadable “.iso/.img” files or via “.torrent” files.
Building your own Kali Linux ISO, standard or customized, is a very simple process.
Virtual Machines Images
If you want to run Kali Linux as a “guest” under VMware or VirtualBox, Kali Linux is available as a pre-built virtual machines with any guest tools already installed. These image are available in a 64-bit (amd64), and 32-bit PAE (i*86) formats.
ARM Images
The hardware architectures of ARM-based devices vary considerably, so it is not possible to have a single image that will work across all of them. Pre-built Kali Linux images for the ARM architecture are available for a wide range of devices.
Scripts for building your own ARM images locally are also available on GitLab. For more details, see the articles on setting up an ARM cross-compilation environment and building a custom Kali Linux ARM chroot.
Verifying Your Downloaded Kali Image
Why do I need to do this?
Before you run Kali Linux Live, or install it to your hard disk, you want to be very sure that what you’ve got actually is Kali Linux, and not an imposter. Kali Linux is a professional penetration testing and forensics toolkit. As a professional penetration tester, having absolute confidence in the integrity of your tools is critical: if your tools are not trustworthy, your investigations will not be trustworthy, either.
Moreover, as the leading penetration testing distribution, Kali’s strengths mean that a bogus version of Kali Linux could do a tremendous amount of damage if it were deployed unwittingly. There are plenty of people with plenty of reason to want to stick very sketchy stuff into something that looks like Kali, and you absolutely do not want to find yourself running something like that.
Avoiding this is simple:
- Only download Kali Linux via the official download pages at kali.org/downloads/ or offensive-security.com/kali-linux-vmware-arm-image-download/ — you will not be able to browse to these pages without SSL; encrypting the connection makes it much harder for an attacker to use a “man-in-the-middle” attack to modify your download. There are a few potential weaknesses to even these sources — see the sections on verifying the download with the SHA256SUMS file and its signature against the official Kali Development team private key for something much closer to absolute assurance.
- Once you’ve downloaded an image, and before you run it, always validate that it really is what it’s supposed to be by verifying its checksum using one of the procedures detailed below.
There are several methods for verifying your download. Each provides a certain level of assurance, and involves a corresponding level of effort on your part.
- You can download an ISO image from an official Kali Linux “Downloads” mirror, calculate the ISO’s SHA256 hash and compare it by inspection with the value listed on the Kali Linux site. This is quick and easy, but potentially susceptible to subversion via a DNS poisoning: it assumes that the site to which, for example, the domain “kali.org” resolves is in fact the actual Kali Linux site. If it somehow were not, an attacker could present a “loaded” image and a matching SHA256 signature on the fake web page. See the section “Manually Verify the Signature on the ISO (Direct Download)”, below.
- You can download an ISO image through the torrents, and it will also pull down a file — unsigned — containing the calculated SHA256 signature. You can then use the shasum command (on Linux and macOS) or a utility (on Windows) to automatically verify that the file’s computed signature matches the signature in the secondary file. This is even easier than the “manual” method, but suffers from the same weakness: if the torrent you pulled down is not really Kali Linux, it could still have a good signature. See the section “Verify the Signature on the ISO Using the Included Signature File (Torrent Download)”, below.
- To be as close to absolutely certain as possible that the Kali Linux download you’ve obtained is the real thing, you can download both a cleartext signature file and and version of the same file that has been signed with the official Kali Linux private key and use GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) to first, verify that the computed SHA256 signature and the signature in the cleartext file match and second, verify that the signed version of the file containing the SHA256 hash has been correctly signed with the official key.
If you use this more complicated process and successfully validate your downloaded ISO, you can proceed with pretty complete assurance that what you’ve got is the official image and that it has not been tampered with in any way. This method, while the most complex, has the advantage of providing independent assurance of the integrity of the image. The only way this method can fail is if the official Kali Linux private key is not only subverted by an attacker, but also not subsequently revoked by the Kali Linux development team. For this method, see the section on verification using the SHA256SUMS file.
What do I need to do this?
If you’re running on Linux, you probably already have GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) installed. If you’re on Windows or macOS, you’ll need to install the appropriate version for your platform.
- If you’re on a PC running Windows, download and install GPG4Win from here. Certain versions of Windows do not have the native ability to calculate SHA256 checksums. To check this, you can open the command prompt and run certutil -? . If you do have this installed, you can run certutil -hashfile kali-linux-2021.3-live-amd64.iso sha256 to verify your download. If you do not have certutil installed, you will also need a utility such as Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier or Hashtab to verify your download.
- If you’re on a Macintosh running macOS, download and install GPGTools from here. Alternatively, if you have Homebrew installed, just run brew install gnupg
Once you’ve installed GPG, you’ll need to download and import a copy of the Kali Linux official key. Do this with the following command:
Your output should look like this:
Verify that the key is properly installed with the command:
The output will look like this:
You’re now set up to validate your Kali Linux download.
How Do I Verify My Downloaded Image?
Manually Verify the Signature on the ISO (Direct Download)
If you downloaded the ISO directly from the downloads page, verify it using the following procedure.
On Linux, or macOS, you can generate the SHA256 checksum from the ISO image you’ve downloaded with the following command (assuming that the ISO image is named “kali-linux-2021.3-live-amd64.iso”, and is in your current directory):
The output should look like this:
The resulting SHA256 signature, “e316b27025922e9f6bca0cacee6dde83dbfd4a549ad18026526f5824af639fc1”, can be seen to match the signature displayed in the “sha256sum” column on the official download page for the 64-bit Intel architecture Kali Linux 2021.3 ISO image:
Verify the Signature on the ISO Using the Included Signature File (Torrent Download)
If you downloaded your copy of the Kali Linux ISO image via the torrents, in addition to the ISO file (e.g. kali-linux-2021.3-live-amd64.iso), there will be a second file containing the computed SHA256 signature for the ISO, with the extension “.txt.sha256sum” (e.g. kali-linux-2021.3-live-amd64.txt.sha256sum). You can use this file to verify the authenticity of your download on Linux or macOS with the following command:
If the image is successfully authenticated, the response will look like this:
IMPORTANT! If you are unable to verify the authenticity of the Kali Linux image you have downloaded as described in the preceding section, do NOT use it! Using it could endanger not only your own system, but any network you connect to as well as the other systems on that network. Stop, and ensure that you have downloaded the images from a legitimate Kali Linux mirror.
Verify the ISO Using the SHA256SUMS File
This is a more complex procedure, but offers a much higher level of validation: it does not rely on the integrity of the web site you downloaded the image from, only the official Kali Linux development team key that you install independently. To verify your image this way for an Intel architecture version of Kali, you will need to download three files from the Kali “Live CD Image” site for the current release (v2021.3, as of this writing):
- The ISO image itself (e.g. kali-linux-2021.3-live-amd64.iso)
- The file containing the calculated SHA256 hash for the ISO, SHA256SUMS
- The signed version of that file, SHA256SUMS.gpg
Before verifying the checksums of the image, you must ensure that the SHA256SUMS file is the one generated by Kali Linux. That’s why the file is signed by Kali’s official key with a detached signature in SHA256SUMS.gpg. If you have not already done so, Kali’s official key can be downloaded and imported into your keychain with this command:
or this command
Your output should look like this:
You should verify that the key is properly installed with the command:
The output will look like this:
Once you have downloaded both SHA256SUMS and SHA256SUMS.gpg, you can verify the signature as follows:
If you do not get that “Good signature” message or if the key ID does not match, then you should stop and review whether you downloaded the images from a legitimate Kali Linux mirror. The failed verification strongly suggests that the image you have may have been tampered with.
If you did get the “Good signature” response, you can now be assured that the checksum in the SHA256SUMS file was actually provided by the Kali Linux development team. All that remains to be done to complete the verification is to validate that the signature you compute from the ISO you’ve downloaded matches the one in the SHA256SUMS file. You can do that on Linux or macOS with the following command (assuming that the ISO is named “kali-linux-2021.3-live-amd64.iso” and is in your working directory):
If the image is successfully authenticated, the response will look like this:
If you do not get “OK” in response, then stop and review what’s happened: the Kali image you have has apparently been tampered with. Do NOT use it.
Once you’ve downloaded and verified your image, you can proceed to create a bootable “Kali Linux Live” USB drive.
Updated on: 2021-Sep-27
Authors: g0tmi1k , gamb1t
Источник
