Kali Linux on EC2 in AWS for Pen Testing (Part 3)

Installing Kali Linux on EC2 in AWS for Pen Testing

TL:DR In part one a Kali Linux instance was created in AWS and in part two the dependencies and web services required were added to that instance. What follows is a step by step guide to getting remote desktop working with Apache Guacamole™ so that the Kali Linux graphical tools can be used.

Part 3

Build Apache Guacamole

These commands are very verbose and lots and lots of logging will appear. Just let them finish. If you completed the earlier steps then they should complete successfully. If not check your locale settings from part one, and that you have the build tools correctly installed. Make sure you are in the directory you expanded the server archive into. First configure the build and review the status before proceeding.

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~/guacamole-server-1.5.0]
└─$ ./configure --with-init-dir=/etc/init.d
...
------------------------------------------------
guacamole-server version 1.5.0
------------------------------------------------

   Library status:

     freerdp2 ............ yes
     pango ............... yes
     libavcodec .......... no
     libavformat.......... no
     libavutil ........... no
     libssh2 ............. yes
     libssl .............. yes
     libswscale .......... no
     libtelnet ........... no
     libVNCServer ........ no
     libvorbis ........... yes
     libpulse ............ no
     libwebsockets ....... no
     libwebp ............. yes
     wsock32 ............. no

   Protocol support:

      Kubernetes .... no
      RDP ........... yes
      SSH ........... yes
      Telnet ........ no
      VNC ........... no

   Services / tools:

      guacd ...... yes
      guacenc .... no
      guaclog .... yes

   FreeRDP plugins: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/freerdp2
   Init scripts: /etc/init.d
   Systemd units: no

Looks right. RDP and SSH are all that is required. Now use the make command to compile and sudo make install to install the software. ldconfig creates the necessary links and cache to the shared libraries you just created and finally set the defaults for the guacd deamon.

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~/guacamole-server-1.5.0]
└─$ make 
$ sudo make install
$ sudo ldconfig
$ sudo update-rc.d guacd defaults

Apache Guacamole Setup

Thats not quite all. Apache Guacamole needs a little setup.

guacamole.properties

Create /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties and set hostname and port using your favourite terminal editor.

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~/guacamole-server-1.5.0]
└─$ sudo mkdir /etc/guacamole
$ sudo vi /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties

guacd-hostname: localhost
guacd-port: 4822

user-mapping.xml

Now create /etc/guacamole/user-mapping.xml with details of the connections and users. Shown here with one user with a hardwired password. The Apache Guacamole documentation has far better hardened examples!

<user-mapping>
  <authorize username="kali" password="kali">   
    <connection name="RDP Connection">
      <protocol>rdp</protocol>    
      <param name="hostname">localhost</param>    
      <param name="port">3390</param>
    </connection>
    <connection name="SSH Connection">
      <protocol>ssh</protocol>
      <param name="hostname">localhost</param>
      <param name="port">22</param>
    </connection>
  </authorize>
</user-mapping> 

guacd.conf

You'll need a guacd configuration file /etc.guacamole/guacd.conf and pay special attention to the bind_host being the IPv4 localhost address of 127.0.0.1 as nothing properly worked for me until this was set.

[daemon]

pid_file = /var/run/guacd.pid
log_level = info

[server]

bind_host = 127.0.0.1
bind_port = 4822

enable the Tomcat user to see the guacamole properties

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~]
└─$ sudo mkdir /usr/share/tomcat9/.guacamole 
$ sudo ln -s /etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties /usr/share/tomcat9/.guacamole 

Deploy the Apache Guacamole client application

The Apache Guacamole client application is a web application for Apache Tomcat. It just needs to be downloaded and moved into place in order to be deployed.

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~]
└─$ wget https://apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/guacamole/1.5.0/binary/guacamole-1.5.0.war?action=download
 $ sudo mv 'guacamole-1.5.0.war?action=download' /var/lib/tomcat9/webapps/guacamole.war 

Now restart the services and you should be done!

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~]
└─$ sudo service guacd restart
$ sudo service tomcat9 restart

Assign a password to the kali account

You will need to change the password to the default ‘kali’ account before connecting according to the Kali linux documentation on AWS.

Apache Guacamole Sign in

Apache Guacamole connections

Apache Guacamole connected to Kali Linux over RDP