Parrot Security OS 4.7 was released on November 14, 2019. The release includes updates to the domain name, repositories, menu structure, tools, and default sandbox behavior. It also features the latest versions of Linux 5.2, MATE 1.22, and other packages like Firefox 69 and radare2/cutter. The Parrot project aims to provide a secure, privacy-focused, and fully-featured operating system for security experts and developers.
3. The Parrot System
Parrot is a GNU/Linux distribution based on
Debian Testing and designed with Security,
Development and Privacy in mind.
It includes a full portable laboratory for security
and digital forensics experts, but it also includes
all you need to develop your own software or
protect your privacy while surfing the net.
4. Project Goals
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Security
A complete arsenal of security tools right in your pocket
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Privacy
A secure and sandboxed system ready to surf and communicate
secretly
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Development
A full development stack with the best editors, languages and
technologies out of the box.
5. Features
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Secure
Always updated, frequently released and fully sandboxed! Everything is under your
complete control.
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Free (as in freedom)
Feel free to get the system, share with anyone, read the source code and change it as
you want!
this system is made to respect your freedom, and it ever will be.
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Lightweight
We care about resources consumption, and the system has proven to be extremely
lightweight and run surprisingly fast even on very old hardware or with very limited
resources.
7. Parrot 4.7
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Domain changes
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Repository changes
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New menu structure and tools improvements
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New sandbox behavior (opt-in rather than opt-out)
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Latest Linux 5.2
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New MATE 1.22 release
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Miscellaneous
8. Domain changes
To reflect the neutrality of a distro that started as a
pentest-only system and became more general purpose
later with Parrot Home, the community voted through a
democratic process to switch to parrotlinux.org as the new
default domain of the project.
We will still use parrotsec.org for other things (included
the old email addresses), and we introduced other project
domains to handle specific parts of the infrastructure.
9. Repository changes
We are preparing to integrate a future LTS branch, so
we decided to rename the current repository from stable
to rolling. Nothing changes for the end user, and the
current Parrot branch will continue to behave the same
as before, but now with a different name to better reflect
the rolling release nature of the system, waiting for the
LTS edition to join the Parrot OS family along side the
rolling branch in a similar way OpenSUSE does.
10. New menu structure and tools improvements
The pentesting menu structure was refactored and re-
designed to make tools easier to access in a more logical
hierarchical structure. New tools were also added to the
project, and we plan to add even more in the future. Not
all of them are going to be pre-installed, but a good set of
tools in our repository enables pentesters to build up the
perfect pentest system for their specific needs, regardless
the default package selection picked by our team.
11. New sandbox behavior (opt-in rather than opt-out)
Sandboxing is a great thing, and we were in the first line when we introduced
our custom firejail+apparmor solution for the first time many years ago. We still
want to improve such feature and we have a whole team dedicated to improve
sandboxing and hardening of the Parrot system, but we had to face the many
users with issues caused by the restrictions of our sandbox.
In Parrot 4.7 the sandbox is disabled by default, and users can decide wether
to start an application sandboxed or not. You can easily start the sandboxed
version of an installed program from the /sandbox/ folder or from a dedicated
menu that we plan to improve in the future (meanwhile the search feature of
the bottom menu will fit all your needs), or you can re-enable it by default by
using the firecfg tool.
12. Latest Linux 5.2
The new ISO files of Parrot 4.7 are being
released only now, but we were the first Debian
derivative distribution to introduce Linux 5.1 and
5.2 to all our users, and now we are ready to
offer it also with our ISO files rebild cycle to
support more devices and integrate all the
latest linux features from the beginning.
13. New MATE 1.22 release
Parrot 4.7 ships with the latest MATE 1.22
desktop environment.
14. Miscellaneous
New firefox 69, the latest radare2 and cutter
versions and many other important upgrades
are all aboard as expected in a properly
developed rolling release distro.