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

Extracting metadata from PDF documents

Document metadata is a type of information that is stored within a file and is used to provide additional information about that file. This information could be related to the software used to create the document, the name of the author or organization, as well as the date and time the file was created or modified.

Each application stores metadata differently, and the amount of metadata that is stored in a document will almost always depend on the software used to create the document.

In this section, we will review how to extract metadata from PDF documents with the pyPDF2 module. The module can be installed directly with the pip install utility since it is located in the official Python repository:

$ pip3 install PyPDF2

At the URL https://pypi.org/project/PyPDF2, we can see the last version of this module:

>>> import PyPDF2
>>> dir(PyPDF2)
['PageRange', 'PdfFileMerger', 'PdfFileReader...