Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing with Python

By : Furqan Khan
Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing with Python

By: Furqan Khan

Overview of this book

With the current technological and infrastructural shift, penetration testing is no longer a process-oriented activity. Modern-day penetration testing demands lots of automation and innovation; the only language that dominates all its peers is Python. Given the huge number of tools written in Python, and its popularity in the penetration testing space, this language has always been the first choice for penetration testers. Hands-On Penetration Testing with Python walks you through advanced Python programming constructs. Once you are familiar with the core concepts, you’ll explore the advanced uses of Python in the domain of penetration testing and optimization. You’ll then move on to understanding how Python, data science, and the cybersecurity ecosystem communicate with one another. In the concluding chapters, you’ll study exploit development, reverse engineering, and cybersecurity use cases that can be automated with Python. By the end of this book, you’ll have acquired adequate skills to leverage Python as a helpful tool to pentest and secure infrastructure, while also creating your own custom exploits.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Reverse Engineering Linux Applications

Reverse engineering, as we already know, is the process of taking an executable program and obtaining its source or machine-level code to see how the tool was built and to potentially exploit vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities in the context of reverse engineering are typically software bugs that the programmers deal with when they are found by development and security researchers. In this chapter, we will look at how we can perform reverse engineering with Linux applications. We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Fuzzing Linux applications
  • Linux and assembly
  • Linux and stack buffer overflow
  • Linux and heap buffer overflow
  • Formatting string bugs in Linux