Kali Linux is based on the Debian-Linux distribution, and is especially designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. It is maintained and updated on a regular basis by Offensive Security Ltd, under the leadership of Mati Aharoni, Devon Kearns and Raphael Hertzog who are core developers. Kali comes pre-installed with more than 300 penetration testing programs and can be installed as a primary operating system on the hard disk, live CD/USB and can even run as a virtual machine using some virtualisation software.
Kali Linux supports both 32-bit and 64-bit images for use with x86 machines, and even supports various development boards like Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, Odroid, CuBox, etc.
- Information gathering: These tools are used to gather information regarding DNS, IDS/IPS, network scanning, operating system, routing, SSL, SMB, VPN, VOPI, SNMP, email and VPN.
- Vulnerability assessment: These tools access the CISCO network and discover vulnerabilities in several database servers.
- Web applications: These tools are related to Web applications like content management systems, database exploitation, application proxies, Web vulnerability scanners, etc.
- Password attacks: These tools perform password attacks via brute force, dictionary attacks, etc.
- Exploitation tools: These exploit vulnerabilities in target systems for networks, the Web and databases, and to perform social engineering attacks.
- Sniffing and spoofing: These tools sniff the network and Web traffic.
- Maintaining access: These tools maintain access to the target machine, to assess operating system back doors and for tunnelling.
- Reporting tools: These document the penetration testing process.
- System services: These tools contain various pen-testing services like Apache, MySQL, SSH and Metasploit services.
Key features:
- Bundled with more than 600 penetration testing tools as compared to Backtrack OS.
- Completely free and open source and committed to GitHub, with the source code of each package being available.
- Kali Linux is FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) compliant to locate binaries, and support files and libraries.
- Kali Linux offers a custom kernel for customised coding and patching up the latest updates.
- Every package in it is GPG signed and, hence, committed to high quality standards by developers.
- ARMEL and ARMHF support allows Kali Linux to be installed on various other devices like Pi, Odroid, Chromebook, etc.
