Kali Linux 2023.2 is a release that continues with the celebration of 10 years of the project
The release of the new version of Kali Linux 2023.2, in which several important changes have been made and of which the inclusion of a new image for virtual machines stands out, as well as the updates made to the desktop environments, among other things.
For those who are still unaware of this Linux distribution, they should know that it is based on Debian and is designed to test systems for vulnerabilities, perform audits, analyze residual information and identify the consequences of malicious attacks.
Kali Linux 2023.2 Key New Features
In this new version of Kali Linux 2023.2 that is presented, it is highlighted that the environment GNOME was updated to version 44, which continues with the transition of applications to use GTK 4 and the libadwaita library (the GNOME Shell user interface and the Mutter composition manager, among other things, have been translated to GTK4). The content display mode in the form of an icon grid has been added to the file selection dialog, numerous changes have been made to the configurator, and a section for managing Bluetooth has been added to the quick-change settings menu.
On the part of compilation with the Xfce desktop default, it is noted that migrated from PulseAudio sound server to PipeWire media server (Note that the GNOME build was ported to PipeWire earlier.) In addition to that, the GtkHash extension is pre-installed in the base build with Xfce in the file manager, allowing you to quickly calculate checksums in the file properties dialog.
Another change that stands out in this new version is that a virtual machine image was prepared separate for the Hyper-V hypervisor, preconfigured to use ESM mode (enhanced session mode, xRDP over HvSocket) and able to work out of the box without additional configuration.
We can also find in this new version of Kali Linux 2023.2 that added Tiling Assistant extension to GNOME-based variant for window tiles, as well as that the desktop version was completely redesigned based on the i3 window manager (kali-desktop-i3 metapackage), which took on the appearance of a complete user environment. The icons have been updated and the application menu has been restructured.
Updating the environment for mobile devices based on the Android platform, NetHunter, it also ended. NetHunter is installed in the standard Android platform environment in the form of a chroot image running a specially adapted version of Kali Linux.
Finally, for the part of the new added tools, we can find:
- cilium-cli - Install, manage, and troubleshoot Kubernetes clusters
- Cosign: container firm
- eksctl: Official CLI for Amazon EKS
- Evilginx: Standalone man-in-the-middle attack framework used to impersonate login credentials along with session cookies, allowing bypass of 2-factor authentication
- GoPhish: Open Source Phishing Toolkit
- humble: a fast, security-oriented HTTP header parser
- Slim (toolkit) : don't change anything in your container image and minimize it
- syft : generating a software BOM from container images and file systems
- Terraform: enables you to create, change, and improve your infrastructure in a secure and predictable way
- Tetragon: eBPF-based security observability and runtime enforcement
- TheHive: a free, open source, and scalable security incident response platform
- Trivy: Finds vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, secrets, SBOM in containers, Kubernetes, code repositories, clouds, and more
- wsgidav: Generic and extensible WSGI-based WebDAV server
Finally yes you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.
Download and get Kali Linux 2023.2
For those who are interested in being able to obtain this new version, they should know that several variants of iso images have been prepared for download, along with several options for iso images, 443 MB, 2,8 GB and 3,7 GB in size.
Builds are available for i386, x86_64, ARM architectures (armhf and armel, Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, ARM Chromebook, Odroid). The Xfce desktop is provided by default, but KDE, GNOME, MATE, LXDE, and Enlightenment e17 are optional.
Finally yes You are already a Kali Linux user, you just have to go to your terminal and execute the following command that will be in charge of updating your system, so it is necessary to be connected to the network to be able to carry out this process.
echo "deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free non-free-firmware" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade
cp -vrbi /etc/skel/. ~/
[-f /var/run/reboot-required] && sudo reboot -f