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

Building an HTTP client with requests

Being able to interact with RESTful APIs based on HTTP is an increasingly common task in projects in any programming language. In Python, we also have the option of interacting with a REST API in a simple way with the requests module. In this section, we will review the different ways in which we can interact with an HTTP-based API using the Python requests package.

One of the best options within the Python ecosystem for making HTTP requests is the requests module. You can install the requests library in your system in a straightforward manner with the pip command:

pip3 install requests

This module is available on the PyPi repository as the httpx package. It can either be installed through pip or downloaded from https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master, which stores the documentation.

To test the library in our script, just import it as we do with other modules. Basically, requests is a wrapper of urllib.request, along with other Python...