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

Checking the security in SSH servers with the ssh-audit tool

If we need to verify our SSH server configuration, we have two alternatives:

  • By looking at the configuration file and contrasting this information manually
  • By using ssh-audit, which is a script developed in Python that will allow us to extract a large amount of information about our protocol configuration

In this section, we will be looking at the second alternative – the ssh-audit tool.

ssh-audit (https://pypi.org/project/ssh-audit) is an open source tool written in Python that has the capacity to scan the configuration of our SSH server and will indicate whether the different configurations that we have applied are secure.

Some of the main features of this tool are that it allows us to detect the login banner, for example, if we are using an insecure protocol such as SSH1. This tool also has the capacity to check the key exchange algorithms, the public key of the host, and information related...