Installed Kali KDE and it had an extra user called CouchDB

[Haydenbear]

My Fiance decided she was ready to move from Linux server troubleshooting to light penetration testing as well as network monitoring to help her work towards another cert and a promotion at work, so I told her to try out backtrack, which is now Kali, I've been using Arch for a while so I haven't been paying a lot of attention to debian distros, especially specialized ones like Kali. Anyways after she had finished installing Kali's KDE variant, she came to me with a few questions. The first of which was "Who is CouchDB." I laughed just a little bit, mainly inside, and then asked what she meant by that. Apparently her clean install of Kali-KDE had a user profile built in called CouchDB, so I assumed it was a new feature, I attempted a few likely default passwords but couldn't log in to the account, so I logged us in as root. I started googling and checking forums trying to figure out where it came from, why it was there, etc. After a short session of maybe 20 minutes I had found nothing, not one single post claiming anything like what we were dealing with. I found this to be quite curious, I have just never seen or heard of CouchDB being automatically created as a user. We ended up formatting the drive and installing a the more common "gnome variant" of Kali. There was no CouchDB profile to be found, which made me even more suspicious.

I assume she didn't check the Sha256sum, but she said she did. Has anyone else come across this, or anything similar when installing a fresh ISO? Is it something stupid? If it is, I am sorry to waste time and space. Looking forward to any explanation.

TL;DR

Built in profile named "CouchDB" in Kali KDE?

[grid]

CouchDB is part of the base Kali install. The couchdb user you see in /etc/passwd is the CouchDB admin.

I've not used CouchDB myself, but I ran dpkg, and the description says "RESTful document oriented database"

[Haydenbear]

Thank you,

I just did not look hard enough. After now using the gnome variant of kali with her for the last few days, I have definitely noticed that when we installed, there was no CouchDB group automatically enabled, to our knowledge, not in shown in the users panel atleast.. I understand that it is in the base package and it can be set up, I just didn't know that it would automatically enable itself as a user.

I am still not sure if that was supposed to happen or if she did something during install without realizing it.

[grid]

No problem

The Kali dev team does their best to make sure packages are installed & ready when you setup Kali, so I'm thinking that CouchDB was setup during install.