With the launch of our brand-new forums, we thought we would update our documentation and explore how everyone can contribute to the growth of Kali Linux. Kali is a multi-platform project that thrives on the the contributions of its community. Whether you’re curious about how you can pitch in or simply want to learn more about how contributions shape our platform, keep reading. For a deeper dive, don’t forget to check out the relevant Kali Docs pages. Where Contributions Happen Kali Linux currently benefits from community support in four primary areas: Documentation, Packages, Hardware, and Co ..read more

Over the past year we have been hard at work on refreshing the Kali Forums, and today we are proud to announce the official launch. We have taken what we have learnt over the years decades, and created a new home from scratch. At the same time, we are welcoming a new team of community moderators who have been helping us over on Discord. Before you go check it out, lets first take a look at why we are doing this. What a forum means to us Our forums have been a staple in Kali’s long history, spanning all the way back to before BackTrack. Then, everything was done through forums posting, includin ..read more

The i386 architecture has long been obsolete, and from this week, support for i386 in Kali Linux is going to shrink significantly: i386 kernel and images are going away. Images and releases will no longer be created for this platform. Some terminology first Let’s start with the terms used in Kali Linux to talk about CPU architectures. These terms apply more generally to any Debian-based Linux distribution. amd64 refers to the x86-64 architecture, ie. the 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set. i386 refers to the x86 architecture, ie. the original 32-bit x86 architecture. What’s changing F ..read more

With summer coming to an end, so are package migrations, and Kali 2024.3 can now be released. You can now start downloading or upgrading if you have an existing Kali installation. The summary of the changelog since the 2024.2 release from June is: Qualcomm NetHunter Pro Devices - Qualcomm Snapdragon SDM845 SoC now supported New Tools - 11x new tools in your arsenal Our focus has been on a lot of behind the scenes updates and optimizations since the last release. There have been some messy migrations, with multiple stacks, all interrelating (transition have been like buses, all coming at once ..read more

A little later than usual, but Kali 2024.2 is here! The delay has been due to changes under the hood to make this happen, which is where a lot of focus has been. The community has helped out a huge amount, and this time they’ve not only been adding new packages, but updating and fixing bugs too! If you are reading this, Kali 2024.2 is finally ready to be downloaded or upgraded if you have an existing Kali Linux installation. The summary of the changelog since the 2024.1 release from February is: t64 - Future package compatibility for 32-bit platforms Desktop Changes - GNOME 46 & Xfce impr ..read more

Following the recent disclosure of a backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma, we are writing this “get started” kind of blog post. We will explain how to setup an environment with the backdoored version of liblzma, and then the first commands to run to validate that the backdoor is installed. All in all, it should just take a few minutes, and there’s no learning curve, it’s all very simple. This blog post is aimed at all the enthusiasts that are following the news as the events unfold, and who are eager to have their hands on the keyboard, running a few commands in a terminal rather than just reading ..read more

As of 5:00 pm ET on March 29, 2024 the following information is accurate. Should there be updates to this situation, they will be edited onto this blog post. The xz-utils package, starting from versions 5.6.0 to 5.6.1, was found to contain a backdoor (CVE-2024-3094). This backdoor could potentially allow a malicious actor to compromise sshd authentication, granting unauthorized access to the entire system remotely. With a library this widely used, the severity of this vulnerability poses a threat to the entire Linux ecosystem. Luckily, this issue was caught quickly so the impact was signific ..read more

Hello 2024! Today we are unveiling Kali Linux 2024.1. As this is our the first release of the year, it does include new visual elements! Along with this we also have some exciting new mirrors to talk about, and of course some package changes - both new tools and upgrades to existing ones. If you want to see the new theme for yourself and maybe try out one of those new mirrors, download a new image or upgrade if you have an existing Kali Linux installation. The summary of the changelog since the 2023.4 release from December is: Micro Mirror Free Software CDN - FCIX Software Mirror reached out ..read more

Last month we were privileged to be invited by GitLab to participate in the introduction of GitLab’s DEI Badging integration. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) badging is an initiative that the Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project created to acknowledge and encourage open source projects’ efforts. Since we first heard of this initiative we have been very excited for the launch. Inclusion in the open source space has always been important and the cornerstone of what makes open source work. This sort of formalization of what inclusion means and how we execute ..read more

TL;DR: Dear Kali user, when you have a moment, check your /etc/apt/sources.list, and add non-free-firmware if ever it’s missing. Programmatically speaking: kali@kali:~$ sudo sed -i 's/non-free$/non-free non-free-firmware/' /etc/apt/sources.list Long story now. As you might know already, Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution. As such, it inherits a number of things from Debian, and in particular, the structure of the package repository. For anyone familiar with Kali, you already know that the package repository is split into different archive areas (also called components). Historic ..read more