BackTrack

» see backtrack-linux.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

TTNet broadband arrived at the house around 2006, which is the same year BackTrack shipped its first release. Those two facts belong to one story. The standard setup in Turkey then was a DSL box with wireless switched on and WEP holding the door, and WEP had been broken open since 2001. BackTrack was the disc that turned that break into a menu item.

It came out of a merger. Mati Aharoni had been building a security live CD called WHAX, a rename of an earlier Knoppix-based effort of his own. Max Moser had been building the Auditor Security Collection, which already carried something over three hundred tools sorted into categories. The two projects covered identical ground, so they stopped covering it twice. The merged image went out on 26 may 2006, named after a search algorithm.

What it removed was a week of work. Assembling a penetration testing toolkit by hand meant fighting dependencies on a machine you then had to keep clean, and BackTrack replaced that with a bootable image where everything was already present and already talking to everything else. It ran on hardware you did not own. It left nothing behind when you pulled the disc out. That property is why it showed up in university labs, and it is also why it showed up in rooms nobody wrote a report about.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

BackTrack 2 came in march 2007 and BackTrack 3 in june 2008. Version 4 followed in january 2010, still built on Slackware by way of SLAX, still a live CD first and an installed system second. Version 5 arrived on 10 may 2011 and moved the whole distribution onto Ubuntu, which turned it into a normal Linux system that a normal package manager could keep current. BackTrack 5 R3 landed on 13 august 2012 and nobody knew it was the last one.

Almost nothing in it was written by the people who shipped it. Aircrack-ng and Metasploit belonged to other projects with their own maintainers and their own release schedules. What BackTrack contributed was the assembly: the decision about which four hundred tools go on the disc and in what order the menu presents them, plus the driver patches that made a cheap wireless card do monitor mode. That is unglamorous work, and it is the entire product.

~ the unraveling ~

The Slackware years left a mess underneath. Tools had been dropped into the image by hand rather than packaged properly, so there was no clean way to update one thing without touching the others, and there was no upgrade path between major versions at all. You reinstalled. For a distribution whose users were mostly professionals billing hours, reinstalling every eighteen months was a real cost with no argument behind it.

The move to Ubuntu in version 5 fixed half of that and exposed the rest. Once the base was a real distribution with a real package manager, the gap between how BackTrack managed its own tools and how Debian manages anything became impossible to ignore from the inside.

~ what it became ~

Offensive Security spent a year rebuilding it in private on top of Debian, with every tool packaged the way Debian packages things and a policy about who is allowed to put what in the repository. The result went out on 13 march 2013 at Black Hat Europe under the name Kali Linux, version 1.0, called Moto. The announcement was not that BackTrack had a new release. It was that BackTrack was finished.

That is a gentler death than most things on this site get. The code kept running, the team kept working, the users moved over in a matter of months and mostly did not complain. What actually died was a name that a generation of people had typed into a search box before they knew what any of the tools did, and the specific shape of a distribution you were supposed to carry in a jacket pocket rather than install.

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