Virtual Machines

The virtual machine used for the Security Summer School is configured with all tools required.

Kali Linux is a Debian-based distribution the comes with a handful of helpful security tools used for Penetration Testing, Forensics and/or Reverse Engineering.

The VM can be downloaded in OVA via Bittorrent.

The credentials used to login on the Kali Linux virtual machine are:

• username: root
• password: toor

• 64-bit OS
• 2 GB RAM
• 30 GB HDD space

Currently the VM's networking is achieved through a host NAT. A TCP port forwarding rule connects the host's port 2222 to the VM's port 22 and the SSH daemon is configured to start automatically, so you can login to the machine using:

$ ssh -p 2222 root@localhost

However, you might get better network speeds if you change the networking method to bridge, so that the VM will communicate directly with the same gateway as the host. In VirtualBox, go to the machine settings:

This means the VM and the host will live in the same LAN, so you need to figure out its local IP; for example:

Then connect to it using:

$ ssh root@192.168.0.115

If your physical machine is low on resources (or you simply don't want to live inside the Kali VM, e.g. login in its browser), one thing that might help is running the VM in the background with no graphical interface and simply connect to it via SSH.

To get rid of the graphical interface, configure the machine to boot in runlevel 3, by making the following change in /etc/default/grub:

# GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet 3"

Then run:

# update-grub

Finally, reboot the machine (or run telinit 3 to switch to runlevel 3).

To start the machine headless (i.e. no graphical window showing the VM) in Virtual Box, you can either use the “Start” options from the virtualbox graphical application, or:

$ VBoxManage startvm <vm-name> --type headless

Where <vm-name> is the actual name of the VM which you can determine by running:

$ VBoxManage list vms