Introduction to the Kali Linux distribution

Kali Linux is the most popular and used distribution for penetration testing and security auditing. It is developed and maintained by Offensive Security and it replaces Backtrack Linux being the first release of Kali Linux, the successor of Backtrack 5 release 3.

Kali Linux has been completely re-built and now it is based on Debian. It includes a wide range of tools for reconnaissance and information gathering, sniffing, and spoofing, vulnerability assessment, password cracking, exploitation, reverse engineering, hardware hacking, forensics investigation, incident handling, and reporting. For wireless penetration testing, there is a dedicated set (the kali-linux-wireless metapackage) of the most known open source tools, such as the Aircrack-ng suite, Kismet, Fern Wifi Cracker, Wifite, and Reaver, among others.

In this book, we will mainly use the Aircrack-ng suite, developed by Thomas d'Otreppe, because it is the most complete and popular set of tools for auditing wireless networks. More information about the Aircrack-ng project is available on its website, http://www.aircrack-ng.org/, which is often referenced in this book. Furthermore, Kali Linux supports a large variety of wireless adapters and its kernel is constantly updated with the latest wireless injection patches.

For all these reasons, Kali Linux is the optimal choice for our purposes. The next section demonstrates how to install it on our laptops.