Install Kali Linux live USB with persistence using macOS
Get setup using Terminal and your Kali live environment
I have an interest in security. Recently I wanted to investigate the security of my home network and knew that Kali would be the best tool for this. With VirtualBox and my USB WiFi adapter, I thought I was ready to go; but alas no.
After wasting hours trying to get my Wifi adapter working, I soon realized that a live USB instance of Kali would be a lot easier to work with. I downloaded Kali Live, copied the image to my USB drive and was able to boot to Kali and access my Wifi adapter. The only issue I had was that I was unable to save any data or system changes.
After more research, I found out that I need to boot Kali in persistence mode. I then spent hours trying to get this setup on my Mac. I found countless guides to do this in Windows but no step by step instructions for those people who primarily use a Mac. If like me, you use a Mac and you want to run Kali Live either on that Mac or on another machine, here are the steps to getting Kali setup on the USB drive and getting everything configured so that persistence mode works.
Equipment
You will need:
- USB thumb drive of at least 16GB. I bought a 32GB Scandisk for less than $10. Here is the exact one that I used. however these are so cheap I’d recommend one of these instead
2. A Mac
3. (optional) a Second machine for using the USB Drive on and booting to Kali, but you can do this all on the same Mac
Download and validate Kali
Go to www.kali.org and download the Live USB 64bit version of Kali (or use the 32 bit if you are using an older machine)
Once you have the file, you need to verify its integrity. Run the command below in terminal and you will see the SHA once it has completed.
shasum -a 256 /Users/keith/Downloads/kali-linux-2020.2-live-amd64.iso
e90e0cfb4bc8fc640219dba66c9fe4308c9502164e432c47a30af50ce9cb3ba2 /Users/keith/Downloads/kali-linux-2020.2-live-amd64.iso
As you can see from the output, the SHA matches the one from the Kali site. You may think this step is necessary, but this is VERY good practice. If they do not match, then do not use the file.
Prepare and write the Kali image to your USB Drive
Before writing the image to the USB Drive, we need to create 2 partitions; one for the Kali OS and another for the persistence data. Insert the USB into your MAC and then run this command in terminal.
diskutil list
You can see that my USB drive is /dev/disk2 (yours may be different)
Now we need to create 2 partitions on to the drive. I’ve chosen 15% for the OS called KALIOS and to use the remainder for the data called KALIDATA (but you can specify to use a minimum of 4GB Partition for the OS.)
sudo diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 2 GPT FAT32 KALIOS 15% FAT32 KALIDATA R
The identifier in the above is the location of where we need to write the ISO image to. Before we can do that, we need to unmount the KALIOS partition. Sometimes this gives errors saying that the disk is in use, so I prefer to force the unmount.
sudo umount -f /dev/disk2s2
Now we are ready to write the image to the KALIOS partition. I’ve specified the partition identifier and the iso file from my downloads below. When this command is running, there is no feedback displayed to the screen and it may take some time to run (It took 35 minutes on my Mac). If you do want to see the status, you can hit control and T.
sudo dd if=/Users/keith/Downloads/kali-linux-2020.2-live-amd64.iso of=/dev/disk2s2
Adding persistence to Kali in Kali
You now have a USB drive that can boot Kali Live, but to allow you to save changes, we need to setup persistence. Eject and remove the USB Drive and boot to Kali on your Mac or spare machine.
When the menu is displayed, just choose Live System
Open a Terminal window and run gparted
sudo gparted
Select your USB drive and then remove the KALIDATA partition
Highlight the unallocated space and create a new partition. Label it as persistence and set the file system as ext3
Apply the changes and make a note of the persistence partition; mine is /dev/sda3 and then close out of gparted
We now need to create a mount point and mount the persistence partition using these commands in the terminal.
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/kaliusb
sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/kaliusb
Now we will create a persistence.conf file and edit the file using nano.
sudo nano /mnt/kaliusb/persistence.conf
This will open Nano, where you will type / union
Then save and exit the file by typing
ctrl + x
y
Enter
Unmount the partition
sudo umount /dev/sda3
Reboot and run Kali Live with persistence
Now reboot Kali and this time select Live System Persistence
From now on the changes that you make in kali will be saved to the USB.
