Convert a Debian VPS into Kali Linux

Its great to use a VPS for bug bounty work – usually it has a better connection, lower latency, and you definitely don’t want to get your residential IP banned from say Akamai. Cheap VPS providers will usually give you a few options, but are unlikely to offer a Kali Linux image.

But the good news is you can convert a Debian system into a Kali Linux system quite easily, at least if its fairly vanilla. This method has been tested on both Debian 11 (Buster) and Debian 12 (Bullseye)

First log into the VPN as root. Or use sudo -s to become root

Lets make sure we have wget:

apt install -y wget

Next, let’s grab and install Kali Linux’s signing key:

wget https://archive.kali.org/archive-key.asc -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/kali-archive-keyring.asc

Set up Kali Linux as the only apt source, and fetch a package listing

rm -f /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*
echo 'deb http://kali.download/kali kali-rolling main non-free contrib' > /etc/apt/sources.list
apt update

Now we are ready to convert the system to Kali:

apt -y upgrade
apt -y install kali-defaults
apt -y install kali-linux-headless

If this proceeded without errors you are done! Reboot the VM and you have a Kali environment.

I have also produced a script to automate this, which can be found on my Github. So if you are a trusting person (or after auditing the script) you can simply run:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/neilbags/kalify/master/kalify | bash