I Saw Someone Build an AI-Powered Kali Lab at BSides San Diego. Then I Built My Own.

How a conference demo turned into a full bug bounty lab with Claude Desktop, Discord remote access, and automated health monitoring on Windows and Linux.

I'll be upfront. I've been to a handful of security conferences and I'm not completely new to this world, but I'm not a full-time security researcher either and I don't have a long list of bug bounty wins. This is also the first time I've written about anything publicly, so bear with me. What I do have is a habit of seeing something interesting and refusing to let it go until I actually understand it.

That habit kicked in hard at BSides San Diego.

The Demo That Started It

I was at a talk where Kannan Prabu Ramamoorthy spun up an MCP server connected to a handful of Kali tools. If you haven't seen MCP (Model Context Protocol) before, the short version is this: it lets you connect Claude Desktop to external tools so you can control them through natural language. Instead of typing nmap flags into a terminal, you just describe what you want and Claude figures out the command, runs it, and hands you the output.

His demo, .

I wrote two installer scripts, one for the Ubuntu VM side and one for Windows, that handle the full setup automatically. If you want to run this yourself it should take about 20 to 30 minutes and most of that is Docker pulling the Kali image.

Worth calling out the people whose work made this possible. The original inspiration was . What I built on top is the Windows/Linux networking bridge, installer automation, Discord layer, health monitoring, and mobile access.

Who This Is For

If you're doing bug bounty research or security learning and you want a setup that actually works on Windows with a Linux VM, this is the gap I was trying to fill. It's not a professional red team platform. It's a home lab that lets you move faster and experiment with AI-assisted recon in a way that's more accessible than most of what I found documented.

If you saw a similar demo at a conference and thought "I want that but I'm on Windows," this is for you.

The repo is at github.com/spac3gh0st00/Kali-MCP-Bounty-Lab. Authorised testing only — bug bounty programs you're enrolled in, CTFs, systems you own.