Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Purpose
The Purpose is
- To create my own Pentesting environment with the tools I need only.
- To have better Virtual Machine experience than Kali
I will call it PTArch (Penetration Testing Arch)
Why do I choose Arch?
- I like it
- It has one of the biggest package repositories - AUR
- Kali on VM is not that stable and usable.
Disclaimer. I do not consider it as a new Distro, it is just Arch designed for Penetration Testing and most probably only for me.
Setup
Initial Steps
First let’s make a basic Arch Installation as I did in the following Article - Setup Arch Linux…, I chose Disk Space of 20G, and with different GUI.
root@archiso ~ # lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0 7:0 0 792.2M 1 loop /run/archiso/airootfs
sda 8:0 0 20G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 500M 0 part # EFI
├─sda2 8:2 0 17.5G 0 part # FS
└─sda3 8:3 0 2G 0 part # SWAP
sr0 11:0 1 1.1G 0 rom /run/archiso/bootmnt
Additionally, I installed yay.
sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-bin.git
cd yay-bin
makepkg -si
GUI - Budgie
Why Budgie? Because I want to try something new.
yay -S budgie xorg xorg-xinit
# For Starting
cp /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~/.xinitrc
vim ~/.xinitrc
# write following instead of last 5-6 lines of commands
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Budgie:GNOME
exec budgie-desktop
vim ~/.xserverrc
# write following
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/Xorg -nolisten tcp "$@" vt$XDG_VTNR
# Autostart X at login
vim ~/.bash_profile
# Add Following:
if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ "$XDG_VTNR" = 1 ]; then
exec startx
fi
# Start The DE
startx
As a Result very simple but cute DE:
Packages
Some Packages for better experience
yay -S networkmanager
systemctl enable NetworkManager.service
systemctl start NetworkManager.service
# Terminal
yay -S alacritty # terminal emulator and ctrl alt T for opening it
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybindings "['/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/']"
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/ name 'Open Alacritty'
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/ binding '<Control><Alt>t'
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/ command 'alacritty'
# Get a theme from https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty-theme
# import should be added to this ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
# Nice Command Alternatives
yay -S btop # nicer variant of top
yay -S bat # better cat
yay -S eza # better ls
yay -S jq # to read JSON
# add following to ~/.bashrc and to root's basrc too
PS1='\[\e[96;1m\]\u\[\e[0m\] \[\e[38;5;214;4m\]\w\[\e[0m\] \[\e[96m\]>\[\e[0m\] '
alias ls='exa --icons --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias ll='exa -alF --icons --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias la='exa -a --icons --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias l='exa -F --icons --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias l.='exa -a | egrep "^\."'
alias tree='eza --tree --icons'
alias cat="bat -p"
# Other Commands
yay -S fastfetch # For showing to others
yay -S eog # image viewer
yay -S thunar # file manager and ctrl alt E
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybindings "['/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/', '/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom1/']"
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom1/ name 'Open Thunar'
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom1/ binding '<Control><Alt>e'
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom1/ command 'thunar'
yay -S firefox # browser and ctrl alt W
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybindings "['/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/', '/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom1/', '/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom2/']"
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom2/ name 'Open Web Browser'
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom2/ binding '<Control><Alt>w'
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom2/ command 'firefox'
# Other commands for comfortable experience
yay -S freerdp netcat openvpn tmux wget unzip
# VMWare tools
git clone https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches.git
cd vmware-tools-patches
sudo ./patched-open-vm-tools.sh
Toolset for a Hacker that you are free to customize and add more.
yay -S --noconfirm nmap wireshark-qt dirb gobuster nikto smbclient smbmap enum4linux metasploit postgresql sqlmap impacket john ffuf hashcat hydra steghide gdb netdiscover
For the time, these tools are enough. Final Result is a Penetration Testing Environment that is not as great as Kali, but I liked it.
ArchISO
Let’s convert the Arch based Penetration Testing Environment to new Linux “Distro”. The tool for this is archiso. It is too complicated, I just somehow followed the wiki guide, and I do not want to include this heresy over here :P.
Size of resulting iso is 2.2G, which I consider a good result. It kind of working sample of my distro, but it is quite shitty to install.
Conclusion
My purpose was to create a new Linux Distro with the things I need for Pen Testing. However, I would accept, PTArch is not that good as other Pentesting distros. The most important is the things we learnt in the journey to achieve the Goal.
The resulting ISO: