Book Image

Mastering Python for Networking and Security - Second Edition

By : José Ortega
Book Image

Mastering Python for Networking and Security - Second Edition

By: José Ortega

Overview of this book

It’s now more apparent than ever that security is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure, and that devastating data breaches can occur from simple network line hacks. As shown in this book, combining the latest version of Python with an increased focus on network security can help you to level up your defenses against cyber attacks and cyber threats. Python is being used for increasingly advanced tasks, with the latest update introducing new libraries and packages featured in the Python 3.7.4 recommended version. Moreover, most scripts are compatible with the latest versions of Python and can also be executed in a virtual environment. This book will guide you through using these updated packages to build a secure network with the help of Python scripting. You’ll cover a range of topics, from building a network to the procedures you need to follow to secure it. Starting by exploring different packages and libraries, you’ll learn about various ways to build a network and connect with the Tor network through Python scripting. You will also learn how to assess a network's vulnerabilities using Python security scripting. Later, you’ll learn how to achieve endpoint protection by leveraging Python packages, along with writing forensic scripts. By the end of this Python book, you’ll be able to use Python to build secure apps using cryptography and steganography techniques.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Python Environment and System Programming Tools
4
Section 2: Network Scripting and Extracting Information from the Tor Network with Python
8
Section 3: Server Scripting and Port Scanning with Python
12
Section 4: Server Vulnerabilities and Security in Python Modules
16
Section 5: Python Forensics

Network forensics with PcapXray

Within the set of tools that can help us analyze the packets that are being exchanged in a network, we can highlight the Wireshark packet analyzer.

Applications such as Wireshark offer us the possibility of analyzing network traffic and later saving this information in a file in pcap format. This format is one of the most commonly used for storing network packet data created during a real-time network capture and is often used to apply filters to the captured packets and analyze their characteristics.

However, when we have a very large pcap file with a large amount of information, it is sometimes difficult to determine what is happening on the network.

At this point, we can find other tools that can help us in the analysis, among which we can highlight PcapXray. This tool offers us visual network diagrams with all the incoming and outgoing traffic from a capture that we have made previously.

This tool allows us to graphically display all...