Automating Kali Linux Installations: A Guide for Efficient Pentesters

As you know, Kali is a Linux distribution specialized for cybersecurity. It allows you to perform vulnerability analysis, intrusion testing, network packet analysis, reverse engineering, and various other tasks. If you’re a pentester, you likely use it and know that creating Kali Linux VMs for each mission can be daunting!

Fortunately, a new open-source project called Kali-automation-install will make your life much easier. This tool enables you to automatically create a Kali Linux VM with all the necessary tools pre-installed, using a simple bash script that can be quickly and easily modified. This allows you to tailor your setup to meet the specific requirements of each of your expert missions ;-).

The logo of Kali Linux, a pentesting distribution based on Debian.

This project was developed by sKillseries, a regular in the offensive cyber world. It also allows you to configure Kali to work with the two most common hypervisors: VirtualBox and VMware.

To use it, you will first need to install Packer and the hypervisor of your choice (I chose Virtualbox for the example).

apt install packer virtualbox virtualbox-ext-pack

Then you can modify the variables in the kali-vars.json file to customize your Kali Linux VM.

{ "iso_url": "<Kali-Linux Download Link>", "iso_checksum": "<SHA256Checksum of the ISO>" }

Finally, once these modifications have been made, you can initiate the creation of the VM with a single command directly from your terminal or your own scripts.

packer build -var-file=kali-vars.json config-virtualbox.json

You can even do it in headless mode if you want (without interaction) by adding the following parameter to your hypervisor’s JSON file.

"headless": "1"

You will find all the information about this project on its GitHub page.