Parrot Security OS 4.11 releases
Parrot Security OS is a security-oriented operating system, which is designed for infiltration testing, computer forensics, reverse engineering, attack, cloud penetration testing, privacy / anonymous, password, and other occasions. The release is based on Debian, which features the MATE desktop environment and developed by the Frozen box network.
Features
- Secure
Always updated, frequently released and fully sandboxed! Everything is under your complete control. - Free (as in freedom)
Feel free to get the system, share with anyone, read the source code and change it as you want!
this system is made to respect your freedom, and it ever will be. - Lightweight
We care about resource consumption, and the system has proven to be extremely lightweight and run surprisingly fast even on very old hardware or with very limited resources.
The developer teams announce the release of Parrot Security OS 4.11, a security-oriented operating system designed for penetration testing, computer forensics, reverse engineering, attacks, cloud penetration testing, privacy/anonymity, passwords and more. The distribution is based on Debian, which features the MATE desktop environment and was developed by the Frozen box network.
Changelog
Debian freezing and LTS plans
Debian is in “feature freeze” state to prepare for the new stable release. Parrot 4.11 will benefit from this, and all the updates from now on will be subject to more tests.
We will catch the opportunity of a new Debian release to convert the current branch into a Long Term Support branch with fewer updates for a very reliable user experience. The Long Term Support conversion plan will also re-introduce ARM support and init freedom.
We are evaluating the idea of continuing to provide a Rolling Release branch along side the LTS one.
Important updates
Linux 5.10 is the default kernel of this new Parrot version, with better hardware support for very recent hardware. We plan to release Linux 5.11 as soon as possible as a later update.
We have finally purged many old, broken and unmaintained tools, and revisited many of the existing ones. Our tool metapackages were revisited as well to reflect this little revolution. Parrot 4.11 provides cleaner metapackages, updated tools and a more consistent repository.
Previous Parrot versions used to have un-needed services shut down by default, but such services happened to re-enable randomly after system updates. We have enforced some systemd rules to prevent this happening.
Certain tools used for Linux local privilege escalation represented a security hazard for parrot, so we have disabled and unarmed them (i.e. xspy is no longer an executable file in /usr/bin).
Alternate Editions
Kde Plasma now works again as expected, and it was updated to provide a better look and feel.
XFCE has been updated with several improvements and fixes.
Noticeable updates for pentesters
Metasploit framework was updated to 6.0.36, and we keep updating it weekly.
Bettercap has finally been updated to 2.29, and 2.30 is coming very soon.
Pompem was patched from Parrot team to properly handle down services and use the new wpvulndb server.
Routersploit was updated to make it work with python 3.9.
Xspy was patched to not be executable on host system.
Fish and Zsh support is now available in our skel, including the latest zsh-autocomplete version.
We can’t report all the updates done to our tools here. If you are interested in a particular package, please read its specific changelog in /usr/share/doc/packagename to know more.
Noticeable updates for developers
VSCodium, the open-source binary distribution of VSCode with telemetry removed at source level, is still our default development tool, and it was updated to its latest version (1.54). Geany (with some Parrot customizations) is also pre-installed for those running on less powerful hardware.
Parrot now ships with Python 3.9. Python 2 is finally deprecated, and /usr/bin/python now points to /usr/bin/python3 by default.
Parrot also includes Go 1.15, and Go 1.16 will come very soon.
The default Gcc version is 10.2.1.
Open a terminal window, type sudo apt show parrot-devel- and press TAB a couple of times to get the list of available packages from the bash autocompletion.
Complete the command with the package of your choice to know more about the features delivered (i.e. apt show parrot-devel-golang).
Additional metapackages for developers will come soon.
Other updates from upstream providers
As always, this version ships with all the latest updates from our upstream sources (mostly Debian), and every new fix, improvement (or bug) is now included in Parrot 4.11 as well.
From the firefox browser to the mate desktop environment, all the awesome upates and security fixes from upstream sources since the previous release are now part of the Parrot repository and hence part of this new release.
You can upgrade an existing system via APT using one of the following commands:
sudo parrot-upgrade
or
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
