Raspberry Pi as PenTest tool

I've previously mentioned the Rasberry Pi, the cool credit-card sized Linux computer that is very inexpensive, and can be easily attached to a monitor and keyboard.

Well, I came across this interesting posting at InfoSec Institute resources on using the Rasberry Pi as a Pentest system.

It looks pretty interesting.  There are already setup distributions you can download to a SD card that has all the Linux tools you'd need already setup.  The author shows 3 different distributions available.

Mini Android PC

In a previous entry, I pointed out some of the interesting mini-computers that are now out there.  The most well known of these are the Rasberry Pi and the BeagleBoard.  These mainly run Linux, tho there is work being done to put other OSs on them.

I think from a research perspective, these give some interesting avenues of investigation for security matters.  Especially at such low cost, one could have several devices to test against.  Instead of having a rack of full blown PCs, one could have several such mini PCs.

For those wanting to research Android security, things seem kind of slim.  I don't like the idea of using my own smartphone for such work, tho I could see using a separate pre-paid Android phone for this.  But that could still get costly.