Kali Linux 2025.3 Release (Vagrant & Nexmon)

Another quarter, another drop - Kali 2025.3 is now here!

Bringing you another round of updates, new features and introducing some new tools - pushing Kali further.

Kali Vagrant Rebuilt: Out With Packer, In With DebOS

Kali has been using two HashiCorp products, which go hand-in-hand with each other:

Until now, we have been using our Packer build-script to generate our Vagrant VMs.

This has been working well for us. We wanted to streamline our platform building process more,

which prompted us to revisit how we generate Vagrant VMs.

Whilst it is possible to automate Packer, it was not ideal for our infrastructure setup and workflow (e.g. trying to build Hyper-V images on Linux).

This caused us to refresh a few items:

Nexmon: A “patched” firmware for certain wireless chips

Nexmon is a really useful tool when it comes to information security!

For the record, it is possible to-do both of the features above without Nexmon,

as it depends on the device’s chipset and drivers.

Nexmon supported wireless chips are Broadcom & Cypress,

which are in a variety of devices, including the Raspberry Pi’s in-built Wi-Fi!

Raspberry Pi Support

In Kali 2025.1, we changed how we package our Raspberry Pi kernel,

as well as bump to a new major version.

Nexmon support is back as well as supporting Raspberry Pi 5!

Other devices can also use Nexmon,

its not limited to Raspberry Pis.

No More ARMel Support

We are announcing that we too are dropping support for ARMel (Acorn RISC Machine, Little-Endian).

We are following Debian’s footsteps in this decision:

Debian “trixie” 13 is the last release with ARMel support,

and Debian testing (which Kali is based on) doesn’t provide ARMel packages anymore.

New VPN IP Panel Plugin

We introduced a new Xfce panel plugin in Kali 2024.1:

This plugin allows users to quickly check and copy the current IP address of their VPN connection.

Until now, it was only possible to view the IP of the first VPN,

but if you were using multiple connections or wanted to check a different interface,

there was no way to switch it.

New Tools and Packages

We have added numerous new tools and packages to the network repositories:

This includes 10 new tools which have been added to the network repositories:

  1. A quick rundown of the new tools can be found below:
  2. CARsenal
  3. Kernel modules install with Magisk is now supported and are included in the released install images.
  4. We have also added a few other improvements to Kali ARM.

Kali NetHunter Car Hacking

We are happy to announce that we finally have a new budget friendly device:

This device supports internal monitor mode with injection on both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz.

The Nexmon team patched the broadcom firmware,

@V0lk3n ported the Kali NetHunter kernel,

and @yesimxev released Hijacker arm64 version to avoid app crashes.

Kali Documentation Updates

Our Kali documentation has had various updates:

This includes new pages and updates to existing pages:

  1. A list of changes can be found below:
  2. Kali 2025.3 Changelog

New Kali Mirrors

This release cycle was busy, we welcomed 6 new mirrors in Asia:

We also welcomed a pair of mirrors sponsored by IONOS, thanks to William Fleurant:

  1. Asia
  2. IONOS Sponsored Mirror

Fresh Images and Weekly Builds

We produce weekly builds that you can use:

These images are automated builds that we do, not QA like we do for our standard release images.

If you cannot wait for our next release and want the latest packages (or bug fixes) when you download the image,

You can just use the weekly image instead.

Existing Installs

If you already have an existing Kali Linux installation:

Remember you can always do a quick update:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y

Bug Reports and Social Networks

Please submit any bugs or feature requests to our bug tracker:

We will never be able to fix what we do not know is broken!

And please note that social networks are not bug trackers!

Credits and Thanks

We would like to thank the following people for their contributions:

  1. @yesimxev for his work on Kali NetHunter and Nexmon.
  2. @cyberknight777 for working on Magisk support.
  3. Kimocode for making numerous code updates improving UI, stability and more!

We Can't Wait to Hear from You!

If you have any questions or need help:

Please don't hesitate to reach out to us!