Kali 2020.2 on GCP

Posted July 29, 2020 | View revision history

In a previous post, I described how I got kali 2019.3 running on GCP. I’m preparing for the fall semester, and 2019.3 is giving me troubles with installing new packages from the kali repos because kali is on the rolling model and 2019.3 is too old, and won’t upgrade without yelling. So I’m rewriting things to build kali 2020.2 via packer. I’ll put notes in this post for what I had to do to get things ready, including for nested vms on kali.

The effort to get Kali on GCP covered three commits.

Summary:

  1. The new kali disables a root login by default. I re-enabled it by customizing the preseed.cfg file.
  2. I also had to bump the openssh package build. Hopefully this won’t be necessary in future Kali-GCP adaptations, as GCP moves towards supporting later Debian versions.

The nested kali pentest lab is further described, albeit poorly, in the github repo.

Tags: cloud computing, pedagogy, security

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

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