Kali on Google Cloud Platform

Posted November 7, 2019 | View revision history

I had some trouble getting Kali to integrate with the google guest environment. The main challenge is that Kali Rolling 2019.3 is based on Debian Testing, which is currently version 11, but the latest version of Debian supported by the gcp repos is 10 (buster) – and, GCP only officially supports Debian 9 (stretch) at time of writing. I got it working though.

Check out the repo on github

I use the XFCE Kali 2019.3 image because I like installing Google Chrome Remote Desktop on the instance, and xfce is lightweight enough to be responsive over that.

Customizations I had to do:

  • GCP packages needed libjson-c3 to be installed
  • To get GCP ssh-in-the-browser to work, I had to downgrade to stretch versions of openssl-server and openssl-client, and recreate sshd server host keys
  • Had to remove /etc/hostname to allow it to be dynamically set by gcp based on instance name
Tags: security

Dave Eargle is a Senior Consultant in Cybersecurity Assessment at Carve Systems. More about the author →

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