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 format from https://repository.grid.pub.ro/cs/hexcellents/sss/. Use your curs.pub.ro LDAP credentials to authenticate.

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

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 from a host terminal.

The ssh deamon is already active inside the VM and a port forwarding rule has been implemented on port 2222:

$ ssh -p 2222 root@localhost

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