Portable Hacking with a RasPi and Kali Linux | Hacker News Reader

Portable Hacking with a RasPi and Kali Linux

lifehacker.co.uk

128 pointsradiorental36 comments

I always find these kind of tutorial very strange. On one hand, it is supposed to be addressed to people who would be able to make use of an offensive security portable linux install, but on the other hand, it is written for people who need to be reminded to change the default root password.

All from a Raspberry Pi. Why?!

Because it's small? Portable? Cheap? Unobtrusive? Creative? Fun?

In short, a hack?

It seemed like a somewhat pointless hack to me, but sithadmin (your sibling comment) points out some valid use-cases.

Not everything has to be productive.

Because it's the sort of thing you can tape to the underside of a desk, or slip into a ceiling plenum without it getting noticed very quickly?

Surely a normal tablet or closed laptop will look far more inconspicuous just lying around an office.

Not in an environment with any level of decent IT management going on. Most managed IT environments look fairly homogenous in terms of gear, and anything that's not an exact or very close match will immediately draw attention.

Depends on the environment. If I saw a new laptop in my office I'd notice it immediately because we've only got one laptop. A huge office with machines all over the damn place, sure that would probably work just as well.

They namedropped the Pi in Mr. Robot, which might make it interesting to some newcomers to the, erm, "penetration testing" scene.

Ditto with Kali Linux. I noticed a huge uptick in seeders/leechers on the Kali ISOs I seed, after the show came out. And if I'm not mistaken, the distro was never actually named in the show, but the background image on Elliot's computer is the Kali logo.

You can shape some case for it as an charger

I wouldn't say it's really that strange. LifeHacker content is geared at the casual tinkerer and hobbyist that knows a thing or two about electronics and/or IT, but may not have much formal exposure to the subject matter being discussed. On balance, it's probably better to include a few words about ideal security practices.

Personally I'm happy for such tutorials. If you were to follow all the "before you learn X, learn Y and Z", you'd end up in a big, cyclic dependency graph and probably give up before learning anything. Fortunately, humans are good at jumping straight into the middle of a complicated topic and learning by figuring things out as they go. Such tutorials are great entry points.

It's Lifehacker, a branch of Gawker. So quality isn't a high priority.

Is there a hardware equivalent to script kiddies?

This is a cool project if you have a Raspberry Pi you need to repurpose and/or tinker with.

On the other hand, I'd also like to note that you can get Kali Linux running on a Nexus 5 or a Nexus 7, which in my opinion is a much sleeker hacking device and probably less work to setup:

https://www.kali.org/kali-linux-nethunter/

EDIT: Been about a year since I last looked at that page. It looks like nearly the entire Nexus line is supported now. As is the OnePlus One.

Also, an RPi is probably noticeably less powerful than a Nexus 7 which is quad-core.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-2-model-b/

900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU

1GB Ram

Yep, about the same as a modern budget cellphone, but much more open to experimentation. It can also be overclocked, and it does make a noticeable difference. The Pi 2 is more or less usable as a desktop PC at this stage, though it's not going to replace even a 10 year old workstation or laptop in that regard.

The RPi 2 is also quadcore but clocked at 900 MHz - so maybe less powerful but perhaps not as much as you might think

My little brother wants to get into network security and I've been sending him tons of articles, some career advice from colleagues in the field and such.

I am both tempted to show this link to him and also thinking he doesn't need to get his hands on something so portable. As smart and interested as he is, he's also only 16 and has some immature tendencies still.

It's a real challenge for me and I'm going to have to think it over.

Maybe show it to him, build it with him and use this as another opportunity to talk about ethics.

> and has some immature tendencies still

Sure, do talk about ethics, but keep in mind that "immature tendencies" is how people learn effectively. Also, in adult world, "mature" often means "boring" and "soul-dead" and "detached from reality", so it's not a very good standard to judge things on.

It's a nice hack but a small chromebook (HP chromebook, $199) will save you time and also more convenient. Also you will "fit in" more anywhere than having a raspberry pi with odd-looking parts. The guy with a chromebook looks like a student or a tourist while the guy with the raspberry screams "hacker"

You could build something like this with your RPi: http://www.3ders.org/articles/20151025-build-a-portable-rasp...

nice. could be cool in a home automation project

Seems like a neat use for the Pi. I'd be interested to know if its CPU is powerful enough to say, crack a WEP password, in a reasonable amount of time.

Also interesting is the WiFi card the article recommends. This GitHub thread https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/369 suggests that monitor mode doesn't work with the default driver for this card provided in the kernel that's used in Raspbian etc. Does the image provided by Offensive Security use a different kernel?

I've cracked WEP on the first version on a Raspberry Pi very quickly (~5 minutes).

Who needs a full fledged Pi , this can be done using a small Wifi router as well - http://minipwner.com/

For even more smallessnes I'd use a CHIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx1uTWF7qRA (watch the video, just for the team groovy spirit)

Could we please NOT shorten Raspberry Pi to RasPi? It breaks searches and looks childish. You wouldn't short Hacker News to HacNe, so don't shorten Raspberry Pi

Long too late for that. Everyone uses it in speech already, "Raspberry" is too unwieldy a word. Hell, you've even got (the most popular) operating system called "Raspbian".

guilty, I was trimming the title to fit under the limit and went too far.

That said, we interchangeably use rpi, raspi and raspberry pi at work. A web search for raspi confirms it's quite a common pattern for the board.

I even have a 'raspi' motor hat on one of my robots, the "raspirobotboard v2" https://github.com/simonmonk/raspirobotboard2

It's the de facto shorthand for Raspberry Pi. Language evolves; it's a beautiful thing to behold evolution in ones own lifespan! I have found something my mother used to say to be very helpful here, if you're feeling particularly curmudgeonly about such things: "you can be right, or you can be happy."

She went on to say that being "right" isn't true as often as one thinks, and in any case, forcing your "rightness" on others can sometimes exclude you from groups, opportunities, and experiences, which takes away happiness. Being happy doesn't mean abandoning your principals, either. It means knowing when it's worth picking a battle versus letting something go because you may, in fact, be wrong according to those in the know, and in any case, when principals aren't involved, it's often easier to simply let it go.

This is all a polite way of suggesting what another might say in three semi-rude words, and that I'll only repeat here to potentially prevent someone else from being abrasive, not because I mean too say them directly myself: "get over it."

Good luck with that effort, even the official raspberrypi.org uses that shorthand (Google "raspi" site:raspberrypi.org).

I prefer RPi or Pi myself, but why the fuss? Google at least is smart enough to match RasPi to Raspberry Pi, at least within my search bubble.

As for it looking childish...I suppose that's a matter of opinion, but I have to wonder if you also consider people who call Apple Macintosh computers "Macs" to be childish as well? My point being, even the folks at the Raspberry Pi Foundation use the common shorthand sometimes. If they are okay with it, I'm okay with it.

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