Athena OS

⚡ Dive into a new pentesting experience.
🔥 Born for infosec professionals, passionate students and spicy hackers.
🏆 Get ready to start hacking, elevate your skills!

Athena OS is available under the following architectures:

• ISO Image
• Docker Image
• WSL (Windows Subsystem For Linux)

Athena OS is an open-source, Arch-based and Nix-based distribution intended to build a new concept of pentesting operating system. Its purpose is to offer a different experience than the most used pentesting distributions by providing reproducibility, flexibility, isolation, and only those tools that fit with the user needs and improving the access to hacking resources and learning materials.

Athena OS is designed from scratch, and, at development phase, useless modules and services have been excluded in order to improve performance and resource consumption. This design approach allows to review in detailed manner each single package and component to include inside the distribution. Despite being based on Arch and Nix that at first impact could seem hard to use, Athena OS offers a very user-friendly environment to make easy the usage of the resources.

We seek to take a different compared to other "classical" cybersecurity distributions. Striving for a more community-driven operating system, where the user has better possibilities for configurations, more resources to learn, custom integrated tooling, and a really stable operating system. Fostering innovation, continually enhancing the user experience and features over time, to achieve something awesome!

• Organized Pentesting Tools: Classified by Cyber Roles for efficiency.
• Hacking Resources: Various hacking resources are available, including CVE Labs, custom tools and more!
• Performance: Tweaked at kernel level to improve performance.
• Flexibility: Allow deep customization of system configurations, with various presets and modules.
• Secure Software: Only secure packages are retrieved, with continuous checks for vulnerabilities.
• Tailored pentesting tools: Pentesting tools categorized by Cyber Roles.
• Minimalist: No unnecessary bloatware.
• FOSS: Forever fully open-source and accessible to everyone.
• Comprehensive documentation: Clear, accurate and extensive documentation.
• Industry-compliant: Built according to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, ISO-9660 and FAT32 requirements.

• More and more pentesting tools: Thousands of pentesting and security tools continuously maintained in order to improve the efficiency of their usage and kept updated for getting a cleaned and secured environment.
• Trusted packages: GPG-signed and maintained in a public and dedicated repository.
• Rolling release model: Updated continuously to have access to the latest features, security patches, and software versions.
• Customizability: "Do-it-yourself" and build your system from the ground up.
• AUR (Arch User Repository): Vast community-driven repository that extends the official Arch Linux repositories.

• Declarative Configuration: Declarative approach to system configuration.
• Immutable System State: Configuration changes result in a new system state for consistency.
• Conflict Prevention: Isolated packages with explicitly declared dependencies prevent conflicts.
• Atomic Upgrades and Rollbacks: Supports seamless transitions between system states.
• Reproducibility: Easy to replicate environments and maintain consistency across systems.
• Lazy Evaluation: Packages built on demand, reducing unnecessary builds.
• Isolation and Sandboxing: Enhanced security through package isolation and sandboxed builds.
• Cross-Platform Support: Designed for flexibility across different platforms.

• Pentesting Tools
• HTB Toolkit: Users can play Hack The Box directly on Athena OS using the Hack The Box Toolkit.
• PWNage Menu: The PWNage Menu allows users to access instantly the main hacking platforms for learning purposes and to join the main Discord cybersecurity communities.
• Blue Team Menu: Blue Team Menu is born for organizing in a pretty manner the main security defensive tools that users need to start their Blue Team activity.
• Red Team Menu: Red Team Menu is born for organizing in a pretty manner the main pentesting tools that users need to start their hacking activity. It is deployed in different ways depending to the installed environment.
• Payload to Dock: Payload to Dock keeps access to the most famous payload repositories and retrieves the latest version of payloads.
• Payload Environments Vars: For accessing resources in a quick manner, several environment variables have been defined.
• Browser Pentesting Addons: Integrated browsers have been modified in order to integrate hardening and various extensions.
• NIST Feed: NIST Feed is a special tool able to retrieve information about existing CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) and inform you about new published or updated CVEs by connecting to the NIST National Vulnerability Database.

The project is being developed actively, but the more we are, the more Athena will grow and shine.
If you want to help us create something awesome, you can contribute in several manners. Please see the Contribution Guide on our wiki.
You can also join our Discord Server to discuss about contributions aspects, and other topics!

Dedicating our spare time to Athena OS in order to keep the project stable, updated, and continuing to integrate new stuff is not easy, but providing your support will make it possible for us to invest more time, pushing the project as far as possible.

These awesome people have already donated to the development of Athena OS:

Do you like the project? You may become a sponsor by offering us one coffee ☕ / month!

• BlackArch Repository: Arch-based pentesting tools
• NixOS/Nix/Nixpkgs Contributors: Reviewing, packaging and maintaining tools
• Simon Schneegans: Fly-Pie menu extension
• Hack The Box: Bash and PowerShell icons; Hack The Box icon
• Offensive Security: Kali Linux security tools icons; Offensive Security icon
• Kitsunekun: Athena Chibi Logo

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