AWS
As of February 2023 the following is how to set up an AWS Kali instance. AWSâs interface is constantly being updated, and in the future may not be 100% accurate. Should this be the case, please file an issue on our GitLab and follow Amazonâs tutorials.
Creating our AWS instance
The first thing we do is create AWS account. Only once we see the following screen are we able to proceed with setting up our instance.
From here we want to click on âServicesâ in the top left, hover over âCompute,â and click âEC2â like shown:
From here we will see the following screen. On this screen we want to look for âAMI Catalogâ on the left side as shown:
From here we will click on âAWS Marketplace AMIsâ:
From here we will search for âkaliâ:
We should see the following:
From here we will hit âSelectâ on the official Kali Linux image. We should then see the following:
While here lets take note of what âUsageâ says:
Looks like we will SSH into the kali
account! That is good to remember. We now can select âContinueâ:
From here we scroll down a bit and see all of our options. We have already selected what we need for our purposes:
We were sure to select âCreate new key pairâ so we could access this instance:
If we scroll down more, we will see even more options. Again, we have already selected what we need for our purposes:
By default the storage selected does not use magnetic storage. This will result in some costs. We are sure to change this to âstandardâ to prevent extra costs.
Once complete, we will select âLaunch instanceâ and we will be faced with the following screen:
From here we will select âConnect to instanceâ which will take us to the âInstancesâ tab. We can from here see information about our instance:
If we right-click we can see the option to âConnectâ:
We select this and are faced with the following screen:
Connecting to the AWS instance
After configuring the official Kali Linux image you can connect to the instance by using the kali
user. After connecting, a password change through sudo passwd kali
is possible if needed.
An example of the command used to connect:
After connectingMetapackages
After connection a user may realize that the image is quite sparse. This is to allow for customization and reduced image size. To get the default Kali tool set we can utilize Kaliâs metapackages. Alternatively, we can install specific tools as they are needed. The following command will utilize the kali-linux-headless
metapackage and get us a nice and quick setup:
Graphical User Interface (GUI)
If someone would like to use a GUI, they can do this through SSH forwarding. We have two options, the first is to use ssh -X
to forward X11 and use GUI applications one at a time, or we can use RDP and forward the traffic over SSH. To set up RDP, we will run the RDP with Xfce script used for WSL. After this, we can tunnel with ssh -N -L 3390:127.0.0.1:3390
and connect using any remote desktop client to 127.0.0.1:3390
.
NVIDIA drivers
Another common utility is to use GPUs for cracking. This can be done as well through the AWS instance, however we must be careful to install the NVIDIA packages after everything is up-to-date and the proper Linux headers are installed:
Reconnect to the session:
Reconnect again.
For more information on NVIDIA drivers, check here.
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