Kali Linux is an open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security Research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering.
Kali Linux is an open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security Research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering.
Pretty much that. It has all the sane defaults that protect and enable you when starting out in SecOps.
And for more experienced users it’s later on: “before I setup everything again, I just use Kali.”
It isn’t a secure operating system. It is a toolkit for pen testing and red team hackers. Definitely not a daily driver kind of OS.
Where did I say otherwise? 🤔
You mention “sane defaults”. That might mislead someone because it is ambiguous. The terminal
defaultsused to default to a root prompt, exemplifying that it isn’t a distro focused on sane defaults for a desktop distro.Kali is a tool for a specific job. Its meant mostly for hacking or troubleshooting/analysis, being an OS for executing a collection CLI/TUI and GUI utils.
-Edited everything to make myself more intelligible.
It has not defaulted to root prompt in many years.
Thanks for some updated context.
Except it is secure by design.
But you’re right about it not being meant as a daily driver.
it’s not secure by design, since it’s not made to be secure, and also uses unstable versions of a lot of packages to make certain exploits work
What do you mean secure by design? What part of it is secure. Compare it to actually security focused Linux operating systems like QubesOS, Kicksecure, or Secureblue. Literally any OS that supports the Brace tool (made by the creator of DivestOS) is much more secure than Kali Linux. Kali is purpose built for red team work, not being secure (aka reducing attack surface or designing around a threat model).
Kali is secure as in once it’s configured, it cannot be accessed without creds, keys etc. That meets the definition of ‘secure’. It’s just Linux with a bunch of pre installed packages.
Of course something can always be more secure. But saying Kali isn’t secure is like me saying your PC isn’t secure because it isn’t air gapped like my most secure PC.
PCs aren’t secure. Linux default isnt secure. Kali has so many apps/tools installed by default that it isnt comparable to default Linux. It has massive attack surface and no security design, therefore calling it secure isn’t accurate.
If no effort was put into the security design of an OS, why call it secure?