OutlineĬreating such an installation is a bit tricky and involves quite a bit of manual intervention: You can easily make the harddisks of the machine on which you work, unreadable and thereby lose all your data. Of course, you use the subsequent instructions only if you know exactly what you are doing. Whenever you need Kali, simply boot from the USB drive, but otherwise leave your existing installation alone. Simply reboot the relevant machine from your USB Kali installation, connect it to the network, and there you are, right with the usual hardware and the usual MAC address, but this time running Kali.Īlso, if your main computer runs Windows or some other flavour of Linux, and you just occasionally require Kali, then you can avoid a dual-boot setup.

If you wish to probe a network from the point of view of a specific machine, you usually need to reconfigure some switches to provide port mirroring and divert all traffic to a segment from where you can probe the it.

Use cases are, for example, a tailored bootable Kali 2021.4 installation to be used as a repair, forensic or maintenance tool. the system that boots from the USB drive does not need to chroot to a RAM disk the present Kali installation runs on the external drive as it would do on an internal disk in particular, you can install further packages with apt-get install, you can edit configuration files, and all these changes are permanent even if you boot from this USB drive on a different machine the next time you can also compile a custom kernel and install it on the USB drive.

does not involve any “live” system, i.e.

runs on any 64bit Intel/AMD machine that can boot from a USB drive, either using EFI boot or legacy boot,.

is fully encrypted using luks, including encryption of the boot and swap partitions,.

These instructions allow you to create a fully encrypted standalone installation of Kali Linux 2021.4 on an external USB drive. Standalone Kali Linux 2021.4 Installation on a USB Drive, Fully Encrypted

Bootable usb kali linux