Penetration testing (pentesting) distribution without systemd

Interesting inquiry that has lead searchers to this site for an answer but hasn’t yet specifically been answered.  So I will take a shot at answering this.

Basically, and as far as I know, there is a Gentoo based distribution specific to this task and as it is based on Gentoo it is easily free of systemd, although if you really like systemd I am pretty sure you can have it on Gentoo.  This narrows down to options based on Debian (kali and parrot), and Arch (blackarch and archstrike).    There may be others we don’t know of yet.

Debian based:  I can’t say I liked much in parrot and its confusing networking setups (this was some time ago) but Kali seems like a nicer system to have for any type of work.  Of course they are both running on systemd.  So this presents you with the dilemma to switch the installation to antix, devua/refracta, or mx.  I’d go with the first since it is the most hard-core anti-systemd of the three.  Antix also sets repositories in an organized fashion so it is instantly adoptable to third party repositories (1st antis, 2nd debian).  Devuan, as it merges repositories may cause you further confusion but it may also seem simpler.  MX may be a third choice, it is not really free of systemd, it has it installed, just not active as an init system and service supervisor.  You’ll never miss a systemd/libsystemd dependency with MX, but  to me this is very annoying, as some software don’t just demand you have systemd installed but also have it active as they rely on systemd’s handling of services and daemons to their software to run.  This leads to problems, I think.

Arch based:  Life is much simpler with arch based distros, basically you can switch anything arch based from arch-systemd to artix-openrc, artix-runit, obarun-s6, hyperbola, or parabola.  Both black-arch and arch-strike repositories go on the bottom, you could actually combine both of them, and you get your non-systemd blackarch or archstrike version after a conversion.  It may actually be even simpler to start with an Obarun or Artix installation and add the pentesting repositories below in pacman.conf.

In both cases there may be software that are really designed around systemd functions and may not work without it.  I don’t have that much experience with them to tell you for sure.  I suspect life will be much easier with Arch based distributions than with Debian based, even though I think Kali is a really nice system.

I would and could provide specific information here on how to add those repositories so can install their software but I have the feeling that they would rather have you install their system then customize it.  So I will respect this preference, although many of their own users but the syntax and address of their repositories and the keys and keyrings you need in public view, so they are not so hard to locate.  Many of them come in huge images, by common standards, that depending on the speed of your connection may take for ever to download directly or through torrents.  Only by the time you install them, either during the procedure or later, they will upgrade another ton of pkgs making their image nearly obsolete.

So this boild down to the logical descision to do a little research, install a non-systemd distribution, then enrich it with your choice of software, instead of everything they have in their repositories.  A 7GB installation image reminds us of microsoft’s idea of installing a system and unless you are lucky and it was published today, expect in downloading another 7GB of updates.

Pentesting is the militaristic practice of securing a system and trying to break it to discover its weaknesses.  For various reasons we have an aversion with this trade and expertise.  We believe the spirit of linux, and unix since inception, was to be open and share everything.  The founders at least designed based on this value system.  A culture where nobody needs or wants to break into anything, all they have to do is ask.  What are those distribution designers think and why would they base their work on a security nightmare such as systemd is totally beyond our imagination.    Much of the software as with most, come from upstream independent developers and are packaged for their specific platform.  The vast majority of pentesting software is common to all of such distributions.  A person interested in them shouldn’t need any ubuntu type of handholding to get access to such software.  They should be able to pick it up from the developer’s git and compile it into any system of choice.

Most of our experience is simply out of curiosity on what those people are actually into.  Interesting stuff, and it improves your perception of system and network security but militaristic nevertheless.  We like to promote the idea of a better world (physical, social, and digital) where neither security or countersecurity has any reason to exist.

I hope I didn’t let anyone down coming here for an easy answer of doing pen-testing in 30′.