Book Image

Mastering Python for Networking and Security

By : José Ortega
Book Image

Mastering Python for Networking and Security

By: José Ortega

Overview of this book

It’s becoming more and more apparent that security is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure. A data breach is a major security incident, usually carried out by just hacking a simple network line. Increasing your network’s security helps step up your defenses against cyber attacks. Meanwhile, Python is being used for increasingly advanced tasks, with the latest update introducing many new packages. This book focuses on leveraging these updated packages to build a secure network with the help of Python scripting. This book covers topics from building a network to the different procedures you need to follow to secure it. You’ll first be introduced to different packages and libraries, before moving on to different ways to build a network with the help of Python scripting. Later, you will learn how to check a network’s vulnerability using Python security scripting, and understand how to check vulnerabilities in your network. As you progress through the chapters, you will also learn how to achieve endpoint protection by leveraging Python packages along with writing forensic scripts. By the end of this book, you will be able to get the most out of the Python language to build secure and robust networks that are resilient to attacks.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Encrypting and decrypting information with pycrypto

In this section, we review cryptographic algorithms and the pycrypto module for encrypting and decrypting data.

Introduction to cryptography

Cryptography can be defined as the practice of hiding information, and includes techniques for message-integrity checking, sender/receiver identity authentication, and digital signatures.

The following are the four most common types of cryptography algorithms:

  • Hash functions: Also known as one-way encryption, these have no key. A hash function outputs a fixed-length hash value for plaintext input, and in theory it's impossible to recover the length or content of the plaintext. One way cryptographic functions are used in websites...