Arch - Black ! (0x0)

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Although there are a lot of Pentesting operating systems available Black arch seems to be a really good arch based distribution and it contains a ton of tools the one could make use of. I decided to review and make a guide based on black arch linux.

Now before getting started i would like to say that the popular Distributions such as Kali linux, Parrot Security OS, Black box are still an obvious choice for someone that is getting started in Pentesting.

Black Arch is yet another distro based on Arch linux, and people like me who has been using Arch as a primary operating system always have to either install tools manually from AUR (Arch User Repository), Install a Pentesting Distro like kail in a VM or build tools from source. Black arch makes that much simpler in a lot of cases. I wouldnt call it the most stable release, but if your some one that is familiar with linux, this is something that you would like.

#1 How do you install Black Arch ?

Well, yo could get started here https://blackarch.org/blackarch-guide-en.pdf

The guide contains a bunch of details on installing Black arch. You have different options to do that

  • Install Black Arch as you Primary OS / in Vm ( Download the ISO image from here https://blackarch.org/downloads.html )

  • Install Black Arch on top of your existing Arch Linux distro i.e : Manjaro

  • Build on from scratch.

In my case, i am using Manjaro i3 distro as my daily driver, so i will be install Black Arch on top of my existing Arch Distro. If you would like to go for other options check out the guide or let know know down in the comments.

#2 Adding Black Arch to your repository.

  • Open your terminal and type the following command, this is going to download the strap.sh using the CLI curl check out this url (https://curl.haxx.se/) if your interested to learn more about curl.

$ curl -O https://blackarch.org/strap.sh

step 1

  • Give the file executable permission by running the following command.

$ chmod +x strap.sh

step 2

  • Execute the file by running the following command, make sure that you execute it as a superuser.

$ sudo ./strap.sh

step 3

  • update your system using the following command

$ sudo pacman -Syyu

  • Once this process is over you can install either selected category from black arch repo that you want or you can install all of the tools available.

#3 View and Install tools from Black Arch repo:

  • To view all available categories in Black Arch, run the following command.

$ pacman -Sg | grep blackarch

– “S” to Sync

– “ g” to list groups

– “|” to get the output and feed that as an input to another command

– “grep” to search for pattern in this case its searching for “blackarch”

step 4

  • To install the package that you need you can choose the one that you need and install.

Run the following command in your terminal.

$ pacman -S blackarch -

– ie, if i wanted to insall blackarch-webapp i would replace the with webapp

$ pacman -S blackarch-webapp

  • To install all the available tools that are available in Black Arch Repo you would run the following command.

$ pacman -S blackarch

#4 An Alternate way to install Black Arch:

Blackman is a package available in AUR, if you have AUR Enabled in your Distro you can go ahead and install blackman either through CLI or through Pamac.

  • To install via CLI, run the following command

$ pacman -S blackman

+To install via Pamac –> open pamac –> search for blackman from AUR –> Install

956Ă—605 16.2 KB

step 5

#5 Things to do while installing packages:

There are times where you have to choose proper dependencies, i’ve attached an example below.

1126Ă—114 63.5 KB

step 6

  • Linux headers, if you run into this phase you have to choose your linux header in my case i use 5.3 kernal, so ill be choosing it. In order to find your kernal information run the following command.

$ uname -a

step 7

#6 Few useful blackman commands:

  • Download, compile and install packages:

$ sudo blackman -i package

  • Download, compile and install whole category:

$ sudo blackman -g group

  • Download, compile and install all of the BlackArch tools:

$ sudo blackman -a

  • To list the blackarch categories:

$ blackman -l

  • To list category tools:

$ blackman -p category

Thats, pretty much it about setting up your Black arch, the following post would be detailed covering each tool thats available in blackarch.

Good Luck !

-blankdash

link to my original post : https://blankdash.wordpress.com/blankdash/arch-black-0x0/

11 Likes
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Nice beginner writeup!

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Arch Linux has the policy of being bleeding edge, always updating to latest release. Hence you would always get updated tools and software :slight_smile:

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Black Arch is the Only way.

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Theoretically if you follow this guide, you should be able to then add BlackArch repository and do it that way.

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Me who are u talking to

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archlinux is best!!!

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I am also a arch user first of all amazing writeup :slight_smile: but i would say that arch can be overwhelming because of updates and all i used clean arch and after that installing all the tools i want now one can say that’s also a lot of work installing tools but you can use frameworks to install the tools you want easily imo but loved your writeup.

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BlackArch is a favorite for me, I used it to write Red Team Notes 2.0, some samples were in Kali since I also had troubles with blackarch since it’s a more intermediate-advanced OS. But yeah this one is awesome

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Awesome post! I have to say Blackarch linux can be a complete PITA to deploy and get running as well with the init updates and configuration. but once you get through all of that it is a extremely stable distro. Im fairly new to the industry and have been using Linux (starting with Kali) as my daily driver for 2.5 - 3 years now, and even though the installation process took a significant amount of time and the extreme frustration of having to start from scratch numerous times, and research solutions to odd problems. once I finished and had a 100% operable configured system. There was no looking back.

Through the trials and tribulations of the process, I was able to further my experience and knowledge and experience of Arch based linux pretty significantly.

One of the things that I did notice was the level of eliteism in the Arch -Blackarch communities as to where I would read posts from someone with a similar issue and a lot of the time there was someone replying fairly quickly noting the users inexperience and stating they shouldnt use Arch / Blackarch distros if they dont know how to perform a certain task or get stuck on something that would seem trivial to an experienced poweruser.

In my opinion , its not much different than any other lnux distro, man pages work the same and the commands are not much different than Deb / Fed. so dont let them talk you out of trying it out… The best way to learn something is by trying it and if it breaks the process to fixon your OS just gives you more experience .

Also in my most recent installation, i found that installing from slim ISO (which is most current versioning) and then installing to HD via script which should get the repo updated was a whole lot easier than using the full ISO (which never worked for me) or installing over arch. and the Slim ISO has the desktop env already configured and it works very smoothly compared to the Legacy desktop. and if update fails going through and updating things on the list manually. which is a pita but once you get through it the first time as long as you update regularly, you wont have the dep issues like the first run installation.