To precise it: At the momentduring build and configuring the openssl certificates, the openssl.cnf below /etc/ssl/ was renamed to openssl.cnf.dpkg-new, NOT the link
below ~/kali-live-/chroot/usr/lib/ssl/ !
Maybe this coould be fixed by the order (or time), the packages are unpacked and configured?

I found a workaround for this problem, but it is a bit tricky:

Environment is running a kali live system.

1. Upgrade the running kali live using apt. This makes sure, latest openssl and openssh is installed.

2. start the build process

3. during the build process watch the chroot and when in ~/kali-live/chroot/etc/ssl/ is created, copy oepnssl.cnf and kali.cnf from the kali environment
   to ~/kali-live/chroot/etc/ssl/

4. Now the build does no more crash. Good luck!

Hint: You csn copy these files at any moment from another terminal before openssl wants to be configured. I made it at the monent, when aide is configured, because the configuration of aide lasts some time,
which gives me long time anough, to type the required commands. Bad solution, but works.

Hope, this issue will be fixed some day.

Looks like this issue was silently fixed.

Sadly I do not know, what causes this issue, but I suppose, someone did fix it.

For now, it is working again, now workaround needed for now.

Thank you for fixing it!

If you close this bug, please add a little note, what caused this issue.

Thank you!

Best

Hans

It should be fixed with kali-defaults 2026.2.10 that has been released earlier today. kali-defaults is the package that replaces the file /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf (we replace the Debian version of this file with the Kali version). However this replacement is not atomic, so when installing all packages together, there was a gap during which the file /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf was unavailable. It just happens that the package hostapd-mana was setup before kali-defaults, at a moment where /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf was missing. And the postinst script of hostad-mana uses the openssl cli, so it needs this file.

We've seen this issue in our QA as well.

Now kali-defaults is installed earlier in the install process. We've raised its priority to "important" so that it's installed by debootstrap, ie. the very first stage of system creation.

That should, hopefully, fix this issue for good.

Thanks for the report!