Book Image

Python: Penetration Testing for Developers

By : Christopher Duffy, Mohit , Cameron Buchanan, Andrew Mabbitt, Terry Ip, Dave Mound, Benjamin May
Book Image

Python: Penetration Testing for Developers

By: Christopher Duffy, Mohit , Cameron Buchanan, Andrew Mabbitt, Terry Ip, Dave Mound, Benjamin May

Overview of this book

Cybercriminals are always one step ahead, when it comes to tools and techniques. This means you need to use the same tools and adopt the same mindset to properly secure your software. This course shows you how to do just that, demonstrating how effective Python can be for powerful pentesting that keeps your software safe. Comprising of three key modules, follow each one to push your Python and security skills to the next level. In the first module, we’ll show you how to get to grips with the fundamentals. This means you’ll quickly find out how to tackle some of the common challenges facing pentesters using custom Python tools designed specifically for your needs. You’ll also learn what tools to use and when, giving you complete confidence when deploying your pentester tools to combat any potential threat. In the next module you’ll begin hacking into the application layer. Covering everything from parameter tampering, DDoS, XXS and SQL injection, it will build on the knowledge and skills you learned in the first module to make you an even more fluent security expert. Finally in the third module, you’ll find more than 60 Python pentesting recipes. We think this will soon become your trusted resource for any pentesting situation. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: ? Learning Penetration Testing with Python by Christopher Duffy ? Python Penetration Testing Essentials by Mohit ? Python Web Penetration Testing Cookbook by Cameron Buchanan,Terry Ip, Andrew Mabbitt, Benjamin May and Dave Mound
Table of Contents (32 chapters)
Python: Penetration Testing for Developers
Python: Penetration Testing for Developers
Credits
Preface
Bibliography
Index

Generating an MD5 hash


The MD5 hash is one of the most commonly used hashes within web applications due to their ease of use and the speed at which they are hashed. The MD5 hash was invented in 1991 to replace the previous version, MD4, and it is still used to this day.

Getting ready

For this script, we will only need the hashlib module.

How to do it…

Generating an MD5 hash within Python is extremely simple, due to the nature of the module we can import. We need to define the module to import and then decide which string we want to hash. We should hard code this into the script, but this means the script would have to be modified each time a new string has to be hashed.

Instead, we use the raw_input feature in Python to ask the user for a string:

import hashlib
message = raw_input("Enter the string you would like to hash: ")
md5 = hashlib.md5(message.encode())
print (md5.hexdigest())

How it works…

The hashlib module does the bulk of the work for us behind the scenes. Hashlib is a giant library that...