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

Chapter 4: HTTP Programming

This chapter will introduce you to the HTTP protocol and cover how we can retrieve and manipulate web content using Python. We also take a look at the standard urllib library, as well as requests and httpx packages. In addition, we'll look at the third-party requests module, which is a very popular alternative to urllib. It has an elegant interface and a powerful feature set, and it is a great tool for streamlining HTTP workflows. Finally, we will cover HTTP authentication mechanisms and how we can manage them with the requests module.

This chapter will provide us with the foundation to become familiar with different alternatives within Python when we need to use a module that provides different functionality to make requests to a web service or REST API.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Introducing the HTTP protocol
  • Building an HTTP client with http.client
  • Building an HTTP client with urllib.request
  • Building...