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Hacking_and_Penetration_Testing_with_Low_Power_Devices

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Introduction<br />

35<br />

FIGURE 3.6<br />

Arch Linux running on the BeagleBone Black.<br />

filesystem of at least 64 MB. The second partition should be formatted as ext4 <strong>and</strong><br />

contain a root filesystem. The second installation step is to create filesystems on the<br />

microSD card partitions using mkfs. Third, bootloader <strong>and</strong> root filesystem images<br />

are downloaded from archlinuxarm.org. Fourth, the images are untarred onto the<br />

microSD card. If your system is small enough to fit into the eMMC of the Beagle-<br />

Board or BeagleBone Black, it may be reinstalled to eMMC after booting from<br />

microSD. This is not an option for our penetration testing systems <strong>with</strong> a root<br />

filesystem, which is larger than 6 GB. A screenshot of Arch Linux running on a<br />

BeagleBone Black is shown in Figure 3.6.<br />

Gentoo<br />

Gentoo is a powerful <strong>and</strong> highly customizable Linux distribution. One distinctive<br />

feature of Gentoo is that nearly everything is built from source. This provides a high<br />

level of customization <strong>with</strong> potential for substantial performance improvements.<br />

Building from source allows all the features of a specific CPU to be used to their<br />

fullest. By leaving out support for unneeded features, executables can be made smaller.<br />

Smaller executables load quicker <strong>and</strong> consume less memory. Gentoo’s attributes<br />

are summarized in Table 3.3.<br />

Installing Gentoo is a highly educational <strong>and</strong> often frustrating task. If you have<br />

some experience <strong>with</strong> Linux <strong>and</strong> want to learn more about it, I highly recommend<br />

you install Gentoo at least once, even if you do so on some old unused hardware.<br />

Gentoo is normally installed in stages. First, a very basic system is installed. Second,<br />

st<strong>and</strong>ard build tools are installed. In addition to compilers <strong>and</strong> make, Gentoo uses a<br />

powerful package management tool called Portage. Third, Portage is used to install

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