I typically do my development or hacking in a Linux virtual machine on my mac (using VMware Fusion), but some applications require a native Linux install to behave nominally.
Things like running bluetooth sniffers or injecting bluetooth packets with the Ubertooth One on a VM caused USB throughput issues and request timeouts (which I experienced when first setting up my Ubertooth).
Rather than run a separate laptop for these applications, I’ve decided to partition my Mac’s hard drive and dual boot OSX and Kali Linux. Kali’s website has documentation on this process here.
The first step in getting Kali installed is to prep your USB thumb drive. It needs to be at least 4GB formatted with a FAT partition.
Take note of Device name (disks in my case).
You really need to back everything up before doing this. Seriously. Back it up.
If you are having trouble formatting your hard drive with MacOS High Sierra, read this StackOverflow Post.
Next we need to turn our USB flash drive into an actual bootable USB Kali drive.
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disc2 sudo dd if=kali-linux-2017.1-amd64.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m
When it’s done, you should see something like this:
2664+1 records in 2664+1 records out 2794307584 bytes transferred in 2181.167580 secs (1281106 bytes/sec)
If you are unable to unmount the disk, you can try using the Disk Utility GUI instead.
If you are getting this error:
dd: /dev/disc2: Operation not permitted
You need to follow the instructions here and disable SIP.
Reboot your mac and press ⌘+R when booting up. Then go into Utilities > Terminal and type the following commands:
csrutil disable reboot
Re-enable SIP once you complete the USB creation process.
rEFInd allows us to use OSX’s bootloader to choose which OS to boot into, which makes for a convenient, clean install.
Steps
curl -s -L http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.11.2/refind-bin-0.11.2.zip -o refind.zip
unzip -q refind.zip
cd refind-bin-0.11.2/
./refind-install
Reboot into __ by restarting and holding “Option” key.
Select the “Windows” option and continue to install Kali to the new Kali partition you created earlier. You may need to split it up into a swap and root partition if the Guided Partition option doesn’t work.
Don’t install the GRUB bootloader. The Kali installer may not recognize the OSX install, and the GRUB bootloader will make OSX unbootable (although this can be undone). You will use Refind as your bootloader.
Configure Network Card
Now you can boot into both OSX and Kali, but depending on which Mac you’re using, you probably ran into problems configuring the network card on the Kali install (specifically if your Mac is using the Broadcom BCM4360 network card).
I have this USB wireless card and love it. It’s easy to flip into promiscuous mode and the drivers are already available in Kali, so I just use this, but I’ve seen posts online on how to get the native mac/broadcom chip working. I guess I’ll have to come back to this part 🙂
Additional Reading