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)

Authentication mechanisms with Python

The authentication mechanisms supported natively in the HTTP protocol are HTTP Basic and HTTP Digest. Both mechanisms are supported in Python through the requests library.

The HTTP Basic authentication mechanism is based on forms and uses Base64 to encode the user composed with the password separated by a "colon" (user: password).

The HTTP Digest authentication mechanism uses MD5 to encrypt user, key, and realm hashes. The main difference between both methods is that the Basic only encodes, without actually encrypting, while the Digest encrypts the user's information in the MD5 format.

Authentication with the requests module

With the requests module, we can connect with...