recipe | Offensive Security

Booting Kali Linux Live Over HTTP

Kali Linux Features

Here at Offensive Security, we tend to use Kali Linux in unconventional ways – often making use of some really amazing features that Kali Linux has to offer. One of these interesting use-cases includes booting instances of Kali Linux Live over HTTP, directly to RAM. We realized there’s little documentation around this feature and thought we’d shed some light on it so others may enjoy this feature as well.

Booting Kali Over HTTP – Overview

The basic premise involves using the Kali Live kernel and initrd for booting,

Kali Linux Evil Wireless Access Point

A few days ago, we had the opportunity to deploy a rogue access point that would steal user credentials using a fake, captive web portal, and provide MITM’d Internet services via 3G. We needed reliability and scalability in our environment as there would potentially be a large amount of, erm….”participants” in this wireless network. We were pretty happy with the result and quickly realized that we had created a new “Kali Linux recipe”. Or in other words, we could create a custom, bootable wireless evil access point image, which could do all sorts of wondrous things.

Kali Linux Recipes

A couple of days ago, we received an e-mail from a university professor asking for advice regarding Linux distributions to be used in his security 101 classes. In its default configuration, Kali Linux wasn’t a 100% match for his needs, which were quite specific: