Bleeding Edge Kali Linux

This week has been busy. We are still late on emails but we have continued to work hard with Kali development. The community pointed out that some tools were missing. We have packaged inguma and bully as well as automater and uniscan. The Kali Menu was also made editable.

It’s nearly impossible to maintain every tool in the repository at the most current git version. We have over 300 tools. This was evident when we upgraded the SET package a few days back. We received a request to upgrade the tool SET package in our bug tracker two days after updating it. Our package was outdated. This seems a little extreme. Consider the following conundrum

Your audit is coming up, so you are getting all your tools prepared. To ensure you are running the most recent stable $your_favorite_tool versions, boot Kali Linux and run ” .apt-get update && upgrade“. You will notice that $your_favorate_tool contains a package which was last updated in our repositories. However, $your_favorate_tool has received some amazing updates in the last week. These new features are essential for your upcoming assessment. What should you do?

The Worst Thing You Can Do.

If Kali is not being used as a Throw Away Instance, the best thing you can do here is to overwrite any packaged files. The following commands are forbidden to upgrade a tool which is updated often. This will eventually cause damage to your installation.

# Don't update such tools! Cd /usr/share/ Rm -rf #your_favorate_tool Git clone @your_favorate_tool

Okay to Do…but Meh.

should not be modifying packaged files. The best option is to use svn/git checkout $your_favorate_tool from a temporary directory, as shown below. Most of the dependencies required for an updated tool are already in Kali. Alternativly, you can to include all of your changes and updates.

cd ~ mkdir work cd work git clone $your_favorate_tool cd $your_favorate_tool ./your_favorate_tool 

Our solution.

It was impossible that we said, but it is not possible. Seeing this clash between the update frequency of some tools and the need (of some people, not everyone) to “always have the latest revision of $your_favorate_tool“, we came up with an interesting solution. An opt-in ” kali bleeding edge” repository has been set up. It contains daily builds of several valuable and often updated tools. The repositories remain experimental, so we anticipate that things will break occasionally until more feedback is received from the community. You are invited to use the bleeding edge repository shown below, but please keep in mind that the term ” cutting edge” is not a valid term. There is a reason there’s blood.

echo deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-bleeding-edge contrib non-free main >> /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update apt-get upgrade 

This repository currently contains a few tools, including se-toolkit, set, aircrack, dnsrecon and sqlmap. This list will continue to expand.