kali-automation

Automating Kali configuration and deployment with Vagrant and Ansible. The script will create a customized Kali VM, tools will be installed as root or as the user vagrant.

It uses the prebuilt kalilinux/rolling box from vagrant cloud and applies customizations and tweaks via the remote ansible provisioner. Therefore, you have to have ansible and vagrant installed on your system (using a vm-local provisioner is outlined below).

How to use

Create an Ansible Vault

Start off by creating a simple .yml file that defines a user_password variable, thereby setting your chosen password. Afterwards, simply encrypt this file by running `ansible-vault encrypt <your_secrets_file>. You will be prompted to choose a vault password, ansible will ask for this password when running the configuration script.

Adjust variables

In vars.yml you can adjust your desired keyboard layout and specify a folder for installing tools. Per default this is /home/vagrant/Tools.

Spawn the VM

For keyboard Shortcuts to be applied correctly, one has to first login to a GUI Session before provisiong. For this, simply run vagrant up --no-provision and log in with the default credentials vagrant:vagrant.

Provision the VM

After logging in initially run vagrant provision to apply your desired configuration using Ansible. Ansible will prompt for your ansible vault passphrase shortly after starting provisioning.

Tips regarding customization

Using a local Ansible provisioner

To use a vm-local ansible provisioner instead, one has to make some adjustments to the vagrantfile, namely:

• Change config.vm.provision "ansible" to config.vm.provision "ansible_local"
• Specify the requirements.yml by adding ansible.galaxy_role_file = "requirements.yml" to the |ansible| block
• Remove ansible.ask_vault_pass = true as asking for the vaultpassword is not supported using local provisioning. Instead a keyfile has to be provided, i.e. by specifying ansible.vault_password_file = "vaultpass.txt", where vaultpass.txt contains the passphrase for your ansible vault.

Using tags

Should you want to exclude certain customization steps, i.e. if you are not using the XFCE desktop environment, you can specify ansible.skip_tags = "tag1 [, tag2 ...]" in the Vagrantfile. You can only partially apply tags like this ansible.tags = "tag1 [, tag2 ...]".

Customizing an XFCE desktop environment

For customizing the XFCE DE you can use the xfconf module. To see the kinds of changes you can apply simply check out XFCE's config files in the directory ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml. You can find examples of how to interact with these config files in build/roles/config/tasks/xfce.yml.