Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Create your own Raspberry Pi HackStation

Recently, I became curious about the Raspberry Pi and what it could be used for. For those of you that don't know what a Raspberry Pi is, here is a short explanation.

The raspberry pi is a credit-card sized single-board micro computer. The model-B raspberry pi features an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor that can be over-clocked to 1 GHz. It also has a VideoCore IV GPU and has 512 MB of on-board non-upgradeable RAM. There is no hard disk, but instead uses an SD Card for booting and storage.
Ports on the device include:
  • RCA Video
  • Audio
  • 2 USB ports
  • an Ethernet port
  • SD Card slot
  • Micro USB Power Adapter
  • an HDMI port. 
This device is a fully functional PC when used as such.  Given the specifications of the device, I thought it was a cool idea to build a cheap laptop using this technology. I found various resources around the Internet that helped me along the way. So, in my research I found a video from Hak5 (http://hak5.org/episodes/hak5-1505) talking about using a Raspberry Pi to run Kali Linux. The thought of being able to build a fully functional penetration testing laptop for a relatively cheap price was very intriguing and I set out to see if it could work.

As it turns out, the good people at Offensive Security ported an ARM image of Kali Linux optimized for the Raspberry Pi. So I put this idea into action and built a small laptop using a raspberry pi and installing Kali on it. It runs surprisingly well. Not all utilities run well, but for the most part it is a nice little project. If you want to hear more about this project, ask any questions, or see the laptop in action please come out to the 304Geeks Monthly Meeting at 6:00pm on Wednesday, November 13, 2013.