Kali on AWS

Kali Linux is an incredibly useful distribution for security testing and also open source intelligence gathering. While you can certainly install Kali on a hardware-based system or even in a virtual machine, you can also take advantage of the work other companies have already done. This includes Amazon Web Services (AWS). You don’t have to build an image or install a hypervisor. You just connect to AWS and launch an EC2 instance from the AWS marketplace. We’re going to work through that here, showing you how simple the process is.

This assumes you have an AWS account, which is very easy to setup if you already have an Amazon account and who doesn’t have one of those? I assume everyone else is spending entirely too much money buying stuff that just shows up at your door, just because it takes no thought and almost no effort. I’m not going to walk through the process of creating an account. It should be straightforward enough.

Once you have logged into the AWS portal, you should go to the Instances page from the link on the left hand side. From there, you will see a big blue button that says Launch Instance. This will take you to Step 1 where you will select an AMI image. If you search for Kali, you will find there are several community images as well as one marketplace image. Use the marketplace image, as you can see below.

Once you have selected Kali Linux as your AMI, you will need to select the size of your system. You can definitely select as large a machine as you want, but if you want to go cheap and don’t plan on doing a lot of high-intensity computing, you can use the free tier system, as shown below. This is a t2.micro type with a single CPU and only 1G of memory. You aren’t going to be doing a lot with a system this small but for just playing around with Kali, it should be ample.

This will create a new instance of the Kali Linux image, after which you will need to create authentication credentials. This is done, under Linux, with SSH keys. If you happen to have keys already stored in AWS, you can use them. Otherwise, you can create a new set, just as you can see being done below. Once you have provided a name, you will need to download the key file. This will be Privacy Enhanced Mail (pem) file, containing a certificate that has the encryption keys necessary to establish an encrypted SSH session, as well as authenticate you.

We’re almost done at this point. Your instance will start up after you have downloaded your .pem file and then clicked Launch Instances. You can’t Launch until you have downloaded the key pair, so the Launch button will remain disabled until then. As soon as you launch your instance, it will get provisioned. It takes a couple of minutes or so to start up the instance. Once that happens, it will show up as Running in your instance list. If you right-click, you can select Connect and you will get a window like the one shown below.

In my case, I’m working from a macOS system so I have an ssh client available through the command line (I use iTerm for command line access). Below, you can see changing the permissions on the key file, since ssh won’t make use of the key file unless access to it has been restricted. After that, I just ssh into the remote system. Because I’ve let Amazon do all the work for me, I don’t have to make any modifications to security policies in AWS. It took care of allowing SSH to the public-facing IP address that it allocated for me.

kilroy@binkley  ~/Downloads  chmod 400 Kali.pem

kilroy@binkley  ~/Downloads  ssh -i "Kali.pem” ec2-user@ec2-34-213-11-105.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com

The authenticity of host 'ec2-34-213-11-105.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com (34.213.11.105)' can't be established.

ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:Rv7rErLsH6pch8jxJc6HL+VmzTxZ3TQw7iwm1mJaLok.

Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes

Warning: Permanently added 'ec2-34-213-11-105.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com,34.213.11.105' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.

Linux kali 4.17.0-kali1-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.17.8-1kali1 (2018-07-24) x86_64

The programs included with the Kali GNU/Linux system are free software;

the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the

individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Kali GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent

permitted by applicable law.

ec2-user@kali:~$

And that’s all that it takes to get a Kali instance running in AWS! Enjoy!