The Secure Shell (SSH) gives you full access to the Kali Linux operating system on a Raspberry Pi from a remote location. It is the most common way to manage Linux systems using a command line. Since the Kali Linux GUI is not needed for most penetration testing exercises, we recommend that you use SSH or command-line utilities whenever possible. We found some installations of Kali Linux have SSH enabled while others may need you to install the OpenSSH server.

You should first verify whether the SSH service is installed. Type in the service --status-all command to check whether the SSH service is running. If you see + as shown in the following screenshot, you are good to go. If you see a - sign, then you will need to install the OpenSSH server.

To install the OpenSSH server, open a command-line terminal and type apt-get install openssh-server to install the SSH services. You will need to start the SSH services by issuing the service ssh start command as shown in the following screenshot:

Once you enable the SSH service, you should enable the SSH service to start running after a reboot. To do this, first remove the run level settings for SSH using the update-rc.d -f ssh remove command as shown in the following screenshot:

Next, load SSH defaults by using the update-rc.d -f ssh defaults command as shown in the following screenshot:

Now you should have SSH permanently enabled on your Kali Linux system. You can reboot the system at any time without needing to reconfigure the system to run SSH.