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

Port scanning with sockets

In the same way that we have tools such as Nmap to analyze the ports that a machine has open, with the socket module, we could implement similar functionality to detect open ports in order to later detect vulnerabilities in a service that is open on said server.

In this section, we'll review how we can implement port scanning with sockets. We are going to implement a basic port scanner for checking each port in a hardcoded port list and another where the user enters the port list that he regards as interesting to analyze.

Implementing a basic port scanner

Sockets are the fundamental building block for network communication, and by calling the connect_ex() method, we can easily test whether a particular port is opened, closed, or filtered.

For example, we could implement a function that accepts as parameters an IP address and a port list, and returns for each port whether it is open or closed.

In the following example, we are implementing...