The long awaited Kali Linux USB EFI boot support feature has been added to our binary ISO builds, which has prompted this early Kali Linux 1.0.8 release. This new feature simplifies getting Kali installed and running on more recent hardware which requires EFI as well as various Apple Macbooks Air and Retina models. Besides the addition of EFI support, there is a whole array of tool updates and fixes that have accumulated over the past couple of months.

As this new release focuses almost entirely on the EFI capable ISO image, Offensive Security won’t be releasing additional ARM or VMWare images with 1.0.8. As usual, you don’t need to re-download Kali if you’ve got it installed, and apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade should do the job.

Shameless Plug for Our Free Kali Dojo

Finally, this release comes a couple of weeks before the 2014 Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas. If you’re attending these conferences, don’t forget to join our one day, free Kali Linux Dojo workshop, where we will be teaching and demonstrating the awesome stuff you can do with the Kali Linux Distribution. It’s going to be intensive and hands on, so you’ll need to bring some stuff with you if you attend. We expect this to be one of our most engaging and interesting events ever!

Kali Linux, a Penetration Testing Platform

While keeping an up-to-date toolset is most definitely an important part of any security distribution, much of our resources are also spent on building, testing and fixing useful features for individuals in the Security and Forensics fields. Building on our ever-growing list of such features, we can now happily say that the Kali image is a EFI Bootable ISO Hybrid image that supports Live USB Encrypted Persistence with LUKS Nuke support, out of the box. Yippie!