

Currently, it appears that AV ignores this virtual disk and its contents but as WSL reaches general availability it is possible AV products will become WSL 2 aware. Now that it’s in a virtual disk, much like the process space isolation, it will remain to be seen how AV might deal with it.
#KALI LINUX VIRTUALBOX TRIGGERING ATNIT WINDOWS#
To keep Kali WSL useful you would have to make exclusions for the location in which the Kali files were saved on the Windows filesystem. In the past, one of the WSL issues that would come up is that many Kali tools would trigger anti-virus protections. Similar to traditional VMs, there is now a virtual disk that holds the WSL 2 instance. WSL 2’s filesystem is now in a virtual disk. The end point protection programs might become “WSL Aware”, which makes this is an interesting item to watch.
#KALI LINUX VIRTUALBOX TRIGGERING ATNIT INSTALL#
If you get code execution on a Windows 10 system that supports WSL 2, could you install a Kali instance and pivot from there instead of the base operating system? This remains to be seen as this is still in development and Microsoft seems to want to unify the Linux and Windows experience as much as possible. This is interesting, as it might actually open up Kali WSL 2 to be a useful endpoint protection bypass. As it is in a VM, the process space is separate. While scans ran through WSL2 are now possible, their results will remain questionable until we find how much the NAT engine impacts them. Additionally, we don’t yet know the strength of the NAT engine. With the current release, reverse shells are really not going to be an easy option without playing around with port forwarding on the Windows side. Anyone who uses Kali in a VM knows that for an actual assessment work it’s always better to run Kali in bridged mode, not NAT. This is something that is temporary, and very high on our priority list to fix. In the initial builds of the WSL 2 preview, you will need to access any Linux server from Windows using the IP address of your Linux distro, and any Windows server from Linux using the IP address of your host machine. All networking appears to be NATed in the current release. This brings up some items we will have to watch as WSL continues to mature. These changes fall mostly along the lines of process spaces, networking, and filesystem interaction. This has brought about some changes for those of us who have been using WSL for a while. That should not be a great surprise however, as WSL 2 at its core is really a low overhead and optimized VM. As you can see from the screenshot, a basic Nmap scan works right out of the box! Thats great news and is very promising for WSL 2 as it continues development. However, simply installing something is not that interesting, The question is: does it work? One specific tool we wanted to immediately check was Nmap, which has always been a WSL pain point. However there are a few quick observations we have.īasic usage, such as updating Kali and installing packages, appears to work just fine. Ok, so WSL 2 works with Kali, but is it useful? We are just starting to play with WSL 2, so it’s really too early to say. Overall, this was a great surprise, and means Kali is ready for WSL 2 today. According to the docs you can also set WSL2 as your default if you don’t have a Kali installed yet. Kali’s current WSL distribution will work just fine, and you can convert your existing installation easily. This was a great surprise for us, as it also means we don’t have to do anything on our end to support WSL2. WSL2 ConversionĪfter you have the new Windows Insider build installed, converting Kali WSL 1 to 2 is very easy.

As such, when we saw that WSL 2 was available in the Windows Insiders program we wanted to jump right on it and see what improvements were made. When WSL 2 was announced however, we were excited about what this could mean for actually making Kali WSL more useful in. A cool technology, and certainly an amazing engineering feat, but as is, it just was not that useful in the field. Because of this, Kali WSL has mostly been relegated to reporting functions after an assessment is completed. Furthermore, additional issues with speed, specifically I/O, were also problematic. This was mostly due to restrictions placed on some system calls, most importantly those revolving around networking. Kali Linux has had support for WSL for some time, but its usefulness has been somewhat limited.
