Parrot Security on Windows 11 WSL 2 with GUI

Walid Rashed

Walid Rashed / April 25, 2022

5 min read •

In this tutorial blog, I will show you how to install and set up Parrot Security Distro with GUI on your Windows 11 with WSL 2.

Parrot Security on Windows 11 WSL 2

Introduction

About Parrot OS

Parrot OS is a Free and Open source GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian with designed for security experts, developers, and privacy-aware people.

Parrot Security

Parrot Security, is one of the Parrot OS's editions, it is intended to provide a suite of penetration testing tools to be used for attack mitigation, security research, forensics, and vulnerability assessment.[9]

It is designed for penetration testing, vulnerability assessment and mitigation, computer forensics, and anonymous web browsing.

Prerequisites

To complete this guide, you will need:

  • A Windows 11 64-bit Machine.
  • Administrator or normal user with administrative privileges.
  • Windows Terminal ( Recommended but not required! )

Installing ParrotSec on Windows 11

Step 1 - Setting up WSL 2

We must first enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux optional feature before installing any Linux distributions on Windows.

Open PowerShell as Administrator Start menu > PowerShell > right-click > Run as Administrator and enter this command:

dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart

Now it's time to install WSL 2, but before that, we must enable the Virtual Machine Platform optional feature. Your machine will require virtualization capabilities to use this feature.

Open PowerShell as Administrator and run:

dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all /norestart

After running the above command, Restart your machine to complete the WSL install and update to WSL 2.

Now, Download the latest Linux kernel update package, then run the update package when it is downloaded. (Double-click to run - you will be prompted for elevated permissions, select yes to approve this installation.)

Finally, Open PowerShell as Administrator again and run this command to set WSL 2 as the default version when installing a new Linux distribution:

wsl --set-default-version 2

Step 2 - Installing Debian Linux distribution

Open the Microsoft Store and Get/Install Debian, after the installation, you will need to create a user and password for your Debian Linux distribution.

or You can get it by running this command in Powershell:

wsl --install --distribution Debian

Step 3 - Installing Parrot OS Security Edition

Inside your Debian terminal execute this command to update and upgrade your packages:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Before installing Parrot OS, we have to install the below required packages:

sudo apt install gnupg wget git bash -y

Let's Install Parrot Security now, we'll clone and install the official Parrot OS Alternate Installer from its Github repository, execute the following commands:

git clone https://nest.parrotsec.org/build/alternate-install.git
cd alternate-install
sudo chmod +x parrot-install.sh
sudo bash parrot-install.sh

You will then be prompted to select an installation edition, chose 3, the Security Edition.

When the installation is complete, we will try to Update the full distribution. try the following commands, It will update our system to the next available version:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo su
parrot-upgrade

Parrot Security is famous for its tools, now lets install the latest tools available on the security edition, try executing this command, this will install all the tools:

sudo apt install parrot-tools-full

Yay, We now have Parrot Security Installed on our WSL 2 Linux Distro!

Step 3 - Accessing Parrot OS GUI

First, we have to install Parrot Interface metapackage, to do this, execute this command (this might take more than one hour):

sudo apt install parrot-interface-full

After installing the Interface metapackages, to be able to access the Parrot GUI, we have to install and create XRDP server, this will allow us to create an access port on our LAN Network through the WSL network adapter, then we can access our Parrot GUI via Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection application.

Install XRDP with this command:

sudo apt install xrdp -y

Once the Xrdp installation is finished successfully, its service will be started automatically. To verify the service status run the command:

sudo service xrdp start

When Xrdp is installed, an SSL certificate key ssl-cert-snakeoil.key is placed in the /etc/ssl/private/ folder. We need to add the xrdp user to the ssl-cert group to make the file readable to the user.

sudo adduser xrdp ssl-cert

Finally, let's connect to Parrot GUI, In your Windows machine, open the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection application and connect to your Parrot VM, to see your local IP Address type ifconfig or ip addr in your Parrot CLI.

PS: Xrdp listens on port 3389 and if you are behind a UFW firewall, you need to open the port to allow inbound traffic from an RDP client. In this example, I will allow traffic from my entire subnet to the Parrot system.

sudo ufw allow from 192.168.1.0/24 to any port 3389

sudo ufw reload

Conclution

You learned how to install Parrot OS on your Windows 11 WSL 2 machine and connect to Parrot GUI with Microsoft Remote Desktop, that's it, have a Good Day!