Kali Linux 2025.4 Released With 3 New Hacking Tools (Desktop Environments, Wayland ...

Offensive Security (OffSec) has officially released Kali Linux version 2025.4 , marking its final update of the year. This release introduces three new tools, notable desktop environment enhancements, and improved Wayland support.

The ever popular and fan favourite Kali Linux is designed specifically for penetration testing and security auditing. Its compatibility with various hardware makes it a versatile tool for cybersecurity professionals to assess and strengthen system security. Renowned for its powerful capabilities, Kali Linux has earned a strong reputation in the cybersecurity field and is the prefered tool for penetration testing.

Penetration Testing: Identifying vulnerabilities in systems and networks. Security Auditing: Assessing the security posture of systems and networks. Digital Forensics: Investigating cyber incidents and collecting evidence. Reverse Engineering: Analyzing software and hardware.

The summary of the changelog since the 2025.3 release from September is:

Desktop Environments - Changes to all! GNOME, KDE & Xfce Wayland - VM Guest Utils Support Halloween Mode - dresses the desktop for the occasion 3 New Tools - As always, new packages added and upgraded!

As with every Kali release, version 2025.4 brings new tools to the toolkit. This update adds three utilities:

bpf-linker – A simple static linker for BPF programs evil-winrm-py – A Python-based tool for executing commands on remote Windows systems via WinRM hexstrike-ai – An MCP server that allows AI agents to autonomously run tools

Kali NetHunter receives several improvements in this release, including expanded device support:

Android 16 support for the Samsung Galaxy S10 and OnePlus Nord Android 15 support for the Xiaomi Mi 9

The NetHunter Terminal has been restored with improved compatibility for Magisk versions that use interactive mode, preventing terminal sessions from closing when pressing Ctrl+C .

Additionally, Wifipumpkin3 has been enhanced with updated phishing templates and a new preview tab within the NetHunter app.

Additional improvements in Kali Linux 2025.4 include:

Kali Live images are now distributed exclusively via BitTorrent due to their increased size Three new community mirrors in Asia and one in the United States to improve download availability Behind-the-scenes reliability and performance improvements to Kali Cloud and the Kali WSL app

As with GNOME updates in Kali, all themes have received a fresh coat of paint - everything has been tuned to look sharp and feel smooth.

The Totem video player has been replaced with the new Showtime app , and the app grid now finally organizes Kali tools into folders , just like the does, making it far more intuitive to find the tool you need.

Another quality-of-life improvement is the addition of a shortcut to quickly open a terminal (finally!), using Ctrl+Alt+T or Win+T - just like in our other desktops.

One of the major changes in GNOME 49 is the removal of X11 session support. Wayland is now the default - and only - window server , transition is seamless and VM support is excellent.

If you want to know more the details of the new shell version, check out the official GNOME 49 release notes .

KDE Plasma desktop has been bumped up to version 6.5, which brings two major releases of the desktop together. Here are some of the most relevant new features:

More flexible window tiling New screenshot tool , with extra editing features Quick access to pinned clipboard items in the panel Fuzzy matching support for KRunner (Plasma’s /launch/calculator/… tool), which means that even if you misspell an app’s name, it will still find it for you.

With this update, we wanted to bring support for color themes to Xfce , putting it on par with the already available settings in the other desktops (GNOME and KDE). Now you can fully customize the colors of your Kali installation with the new themes for icons, GTK 3/4 windows, Qt 5/6 windows, and Xfce’s window manager decorations.

All these settings can be changed through the “Appearance” application, except for Qt programs, which require separate themes and can be tweaked through qt5ct or qt6ct (both installed by default).

Wayland is a modern display protocol that serves as the successor to the older X11 system for handling graphics in Linux. It specifies how graphical applications (clients) communicate with a display server to render content and process user input. For years, X11 has been the default system in most UNIX desktops, but the time has come for a change to more modern software with a more efficient and secure architecture.

Now that GNOME has moved to only supporting Wayland , and KDE in Kali has already used it by default for a few years (since Kali Linux 2023.1 ), OffSec wanted to ensure that the transition and experience were seamless. The only thing that we felt was missing was support for VM guest tools , like clipboard sharing and window scaling, but things have been progressing, and now all the major VM software fully supports Wayland.

OffSec have tested Kali installations with Wayland as the guest OS in VirtualBox , VMware , and QEMU , configured the missing parts, and have confirmed that all of the VM guest additions that you expected in X11 before are now working in Wayland without trouble.

During last Halloween season, OffSec wanted to celebrate by launching a Kali/Hacker-themed pumpkin carving contest. OffSec also launched a new mode for kali-undercover called Halloween mode , which dresses the desktop for the occasion!

While the Halloween mode has now been hidden from the , you can still launch it from your terminal in case you missed it and want to give it a try.

To download Kali images, OffSec usually provide two options: direct HTTP download or BitTorrent. HTTP downloads are served either by a mirror from the community, or the Cloudflare CDN . For the later, there’s a hard size limit: around 5 GB, or 5,049,942,016 bytes to be precise.

OffSec already have an image too big for the CDN: it’s the Everything image , which contains all Kali tools, and peaks at 13 GB (installer) and 15 GB (live). This image can only be downloaded via BitTorrent.

With this release, another image will now be available only over BitTorrent : it’s the Live image

For more background: OffSec tries hard to provide the same Kali Linux experience by default, for all images : whether you download a Pre-built VM , a Installer ISO or a Live ISO , you’ll get the same Kali, with the same Xfce desktop environment, and the same set of tools pre-installed. OffSec also tries to keep the default set of tools relatively stable, so that the tools that you use today are still present in the release.

As time passes, packages tend to gain new dependencies, acquire more features, and generally speaking: everything gets bigger and bigger, and so do our Kali images. The Live image has been flirting with the 5 GB limit for a while, and this time it’s over the limit for good.

The Live image has always been an outlier in terms of size: it is a fully-fledged and ready-to-run Kali system, but it can also be used to install Kali, meaning that it also contains the Kali installer with a minimal pool of packages. For this reason, this image has always been bigger than any others.

OffSec has decided not to remove tools from the default installation, as other images are well below the size limit. They do not want to remove tools from the Live image only either, as it’s going to be confusing, and it’s just going to make the Live image less useful. So the only option was to remove the Live image from the HTTP distribution channel, and distribute it over BitTorrent only. Like they already do for the everything image.

Here’s a breakdown of sizes for the last 2025.3 release, and the explanation for their sizes:

Pre-built VM : 3.5 GB, these are the smaller images, basically it’s your default Kali Linux that is pre-installed and compressed with xz. That’s the best we can do in terms of compression. Installer : 4.3 GB, it contains the same set of packages, but uninstalled (ie. as .deb files), so in terms of compression it’s a mixed bag of gz and xz compression (gz compresses much less than xz). Additionally it contains the Kali installer, which is a kind of mini OS dedicated to installing Kali. Live : 4.7 GB, as said above, it’s a pre-installed Kali system, compressed with xz, plus the Kali installer, plus a minimal pool of packages.

As with every Kali release, new tools have been introduced (to the network repositories). Below is a brief summary of the additions:

bpf-linker - Simple BPF static linker evil-winrm-py - Python-based tool for executing commands on remote Windows machines using the WinRM hexstrike-ai - MCP server that lets AI agents autonomously run tools

In addition, numerous packages have been updated, and new libraries have been incorporated. We also bump the Kali kernel to 6.16.

OffSec starts this year’s winter season with some awesome news! As usual, snowfall is now back on the Kali NetHunter app. Bugfixes, new features, new devices and many more

OffSec's recommended device family kicks in the door of Android 16. Made by @V0lk3n , the Samsung Galaxy S10, S10e, S10 Plus, and S10 5G running LineageOS 23 are now added with all the Kali NetHunter features including CAN, as well as internal wireless injection support. Check out the install guide for the S10 as an example. OnePlus Nord now also has Android 16 support by @kimocoder . Last but not least, @k0d14k added support for Xiaomi Mi 9 on Android 15.

Kali NetHunter Terminal

The Terminal is now up and running again, thanks to the team effort of @yesimxev, @kimocoder, and @martin . At the same time, @kimocoder added support for any Magisk version that has interactive mode. Therefore, hitting CTRL+C would not close the terminal session anymore.

As of this writing, Magisk v30.6 is supported by the Terminal app.

Wifipumpkin3 tab now has preview available in in NH app, updated by @yesimxev. He also added the latest templates of @IKETEACH and @dr.rootsu - , Instagram, iCloud, Snapchat. Credits for the great collaboration.

The kernel install tab is temporarily disabled as it needs some more maintenance. You will notice that @kimocoder started transforming some of the fragments to the new style. He also added a very early alpha version of the in-app terminal. You can enable in Kali NetHunter app settings if you’d like to check it out. Most commands will still go to the external Terminal app. Magisk installer now supports modules install, credits to @cyberknight777 . Therefore, installed Kali NetHunter kernel modules will show up in Modules tab.

OffSec have refreshed the Kali documentation with updates to current pages and a handful of new ones:

Graphics issues on bare-metal installation (new) Installing NetHunter on the Samsung Galaxy S10 (new) Setting up a system for packaging (updated)

You can download Kali HERE

Existing Installs: If you already have an existing Kali Linux installation, remember you can always do a quick update HERE

You should now be on Kali Linux 2025.4. We can do a quick check by doing:

NOTE: The output of uname -r may be different depending on the system architecture .

Should you come across any bugs in Kali, submit a report on OffSec's bug tracker .