Kali Linux 2018.1 released with AMD secure memory encryption support & increased memory limit

The Offensive Security team has released Kali Linux 2018.1, first stable update for Debian based security assessment cum defensive security system. This release includes various updated packages & bug fixes since the release of Kali Linux 2017.3.

In addition to updated packages & bug fixes, Kali Linux 2018.1 includes AMD Secure Memory Encryption support and extended memory limit for Kernel. With this extended memory limit, Kali Linux can now overcome the 64 TB memory limit.

The major highlights in Kali Linux 2018.1 release can be summarized as:

• Linux Kernel 4.14 which includes a lot of features including
  • AMD Secure Memory Encryption Support – Secure Memory Encryption is a feature that will be in newer AMD processors that enables automatic encryption and decryption of DRAM. The addition of this features means that systems will no longer (in theory) be vulnerable to cold-boot attacks because, even with physical access, the memory will be not be readable.
  • Increased Memory Limits – Current (and older) 64-bit processors have a limit of 64 TB of physical address space and 256 TB of virtual address space (VAS), which was sufficient for more than a decade but with some server hardware shipping with 64 TB of memory, the limits have been reached. Fortunately, upcoming processors will enable 5-level paging, support for which is included in the 4.14 kernel. In short, this means that these new processors will support 4 PB of physical memory and 128 PB of virtual memory. That’s right, petabytes.
• A number of updated packages & tools
• Updated Hypver-V support which is now UEFI-based and expanding/shrinking HDD is supported. The Hyper-V integration services are also included, which supports Dynamic Memory, Network Monitoring/Scaling, and Replication.

You can find official Kali Linux 2018.1 release announcement in projects website.

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