Kali Linux users warned that updates are likely to fail for a few days

Showing that it is not just Windows 11 that has issues with updates, Offensive Security has issued a warning that Kali Linux updates are likely to fail “in the coming days”.

The Linux distro has proved an important tool in penetration testing, acting as a valuable security tool for many users. The team behind Kali Linux says that “pretty much every Kali system out there will fail to update”, and it bears full responsibility: “This is not only you, this is for everyone, and this is entirely our fault”. But there is a solution.

See also:

• Microsoft releases KB5055627 update to start the rollout of Recall to Windows 11
• Windows 11 stops being prudish about cursing
• Microsoft has finally realized that not everyone cares about Copilot

If you’ve tried to update Kali Linux, you will have seen a “Missing key” error. This is the root of the problem, and it refers to the signing key for the project’s GitHub repository. The developers explain that “we had to roll a new signing key for the Kali repository”, expanding on this by saying:

We lost access to the signing key of the repository, so we had to create a new one. At the same time, we froze the repository (you might have noticed that there was no update since Friday 18th), so nobody was impacted yet. But we’re going to unfreeze the repository this week, and it’s now signed with the new key.

The good news is that it is still possible to update the distro, but you’ll have to do a bit of work. Specifically, you’ll need to manually install the new signing key, and there are full instructions available in a blog post from the team.

The developers stress that the key has not been compromised, saying that had this happened they would have removed the old key and provided a certificate of revocation.

They also add:

In some cases, you might just prefer to rebuild your Kali system(s) from scratch. For that purpose, we updated all of our images so that it contains the new keyring.

Just head to Get Kali and grab the latest images. You will notice that the version in the filenames is 2025.1c. These are the exact same images as the ones we released a month ago, the only difference being that it contains the new keyring. You can also use the weekly images, starting from 2025-W17 they contain the new keyring.

We also updated Kali NetHunter, VM, Cloud, Docker, WSL, etc etc…